Han Shan and Shih Te (Hanshan and Shide)

Han Shan and Shih Te (Hanshan and Shide) is a hanging-scroll painting by Tomioka Tessai depicting the two legendary Tang-dynasty Buddhist hermits of Mount Hanshan, executed in ink and light color on paper, and is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hanshan (the 'Cold Mountain' poet) and his companion Shide were taken in Chan/Zen tradition as exemplars of eccentric enlightenment — wild-haired, ragged figures laughing and playing with brooms in the kitchens of monasteries — and became one of the canonical subjects of Chinese and Japanese ink painting from the Song dynasty onward. Tessai treats the figures with the rough calligraphic line and densely-packed brushwork of his late style, capturing the energetic informality of the two hermits in a way that recalls both the Chinese individualist Shitao and the great seventeenth-century Japanese Zen painter Hakuin Ekaku. The picture carries Tessai's characteristic inscription in cursive classical script, quoting Hanshan's poetry and reflecting on the iconography of the pair. The subject sits squarely in the Buddhist-Daoist repertoire that Tessai drew from his lifelong study of East Asian literature and religion, and exemplifies the way his late paintings fuse image, calligraphy, and literary citation into a single integrated work.