Letter of the Third Month

Letter of the Third Month is an early-nineteenth-century letter in ink on paper (16.19 x 55.56 cm) by Rai San'yō, held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession 2013.29.823) as part of the Mary Griggs Burke collection. Personal correspondence in the literati tradition was not a private genre held separate from art: a letter from a recognized scholar-calligrapher like San'yō was understood as an object of aesthetic value in its own right, often mounted later by recipients and collectors and circulated alongside formal hanging scrolls. The third month of the lunar calendar corresponds to late spring, and San'yō's correspondence from this period — preserved in significant quantity at Waseda University Library and in collections worldwide — gives unmediated access to the day-to-day texture of his Kyoto life as teacher of Chinese poetry and historian at work on the Nihon Gaishi. The brushwork is faster and less formal than his hanging-scroll calligraphy, but it carries the same cursive idiom that made his hand recognizable across genres.