Scattering Flowers above the Clouds (Sange)
雲上散華之図
- Date:
- 1938
- Medium:
- Ink and color on silk; hanging scroll
- Source:
- Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka
雲上散華之図
Scattering Flowers above the Clouds (Sange, 雲上散華之図) is a hanging-scroll painting by Murakami Kagaku in ink and color on silk, completed in 1938 and now held by the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka. The work was painted in the final year of Kagaku's life — he died at Suma in November 1939, his health long undermined by chronic asthma — and belongs to the very last body of paintings he produced during his retirement years. The picture depicts a celestial figure, an apsara or heavenly being in the Indian-Buddhist iconographic tradition, scattering flowers above a cloud bank in the gesture of devotional offering associated with the moment of the Buddha's enlightenment and with the Pure Land scriptures Kagaku had read for decades. The handling combines the soft contour line of the Ajanta cave paintings with the atmospheric ink of his late landscape style, and the work belongs to the same iconographic family as his great 1920 Rafu (Nude) — a final return, at the end of his career, to the synthetic Buddhist iconography that had first made his reputation eighteen years earlier. The picture is regarded as one of the finest of his very last works and as a definitive statement of the Buddhist humanism that animated his entire mature career.
Scattering Flowers above the Clouds (Sange) (雲上散華之図) was created by Murakami Kagaku (村上華岳) in 1938.
Scattering Flowers above the Clouds (Sange) depicts birds & flowers.
