The Poet Li Bo's Visit to Mount Emei

Dated 1875 and held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Poet Li Bo's Visit to Mount Emei is a pair of six-panel folding screens executed in ink and gold on paper that represents Shiokawa Bunrin's late mature manner adapted to the most ambitious format of Japanese pictorial commission. The Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai (Li Bo, 701-762), celebrated alongside Du Fu as one of the two supreme poets of classical Chinese literature, was a recurring subject in Japanese Shijō and Nanga painting, where his legendary travels through the mountains of Sichuan and his reputation for inspired, wine-tinged composition made him an emblem of the literati ideal. Mount Emei (Emei-shan) in Sichuan, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains of China, was particularly associated with Li Bo through his poem celebrating the moonlight at Mount Emei.