Su Dongpo Laughing

Dated 1892 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this pair of hanging scrolls depicts the Northern Song poet-statesman Su Shi (1037–1101), known by his literary name Su Dongpo, in a moment of literary delight. Su Dongpo's writings were canonical for Edo and Meiji literati painters: he stood, for nanga-trained Kyoto artists, for the ideal of the official-poet who finds joy in landscape and friendship rather than in court politics. Shōnen renders the figure in the broad, confident brush manner that earned him the nickname Daikyū ('great madman') among Kyoto contemporaries. The lines of the robe sweep out in single uninterrupted strokes; the laughing face is built up from a handful of dry-brush touches; the ground is dispatched in a few subtle washes of color over silk. The second scroll of the pair carries a long literary inscription expanding on the moment depicted. The work is a representative example of Shōnen's mature figural style and of the literary-Sinophile bias of late Meiji Kyoto painting.