White Fox

This small Japanese painting of a white fox, datable to approximately 1913 and held in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston under accession number P3n20, entered the museum as part of the Asian collection Mrs. Gardner assembled in close consultation with her friend Okakura Kakuzō, who was then a curator of the Asian collections at the neighboring Museum of Fine Arts and an intimate of the Gardner household. The white fox (byakko) is a sacred animal in Japanese religious culture, the messenger of the rice deity Inari and a frequent presence in Noh theater, where it appears in plays such as Sesshōseki and Kuzunoha as the manifestation of a transformed spirit or fox-wife. Kanzan, whose family had been hereditary Noh actors and whose mature work drew on the Noh repertoire throughout his career, treats the subject with the disciplined linear vocabulary he had inherited from his Kanō-school masters Hōgai and Gahō, the fox's white pelt set against a quietly graded ink-and-color ground in the intimate kakemono format. The Gardner picture is a rare American holding of Kanzan's work and one of the strongest documents of the close working friendship between Okakura, Mrs. Gardner, and the Nihon Bijutsuin circle in the years between Okakura's appointment to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1905 and his death in 1913. The picture is also a companion in subject to the larger pair of folding screens titled White Fox, painted on similar themes for the Bijutsuin circuit, and confirms the place of the byakko motif within Kanzan's mature iconographic repertoire.