Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait is a hanging-scroll painting by Tomioka Tessai in ink and color on silk, dated 1898, and now held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession 11.7426). The painting shows Tessai seated in scholar's robes against a plain ground, his features rendered with the alert, slightly satirical realism that he brought to the small body of portrait works in his oeuvre, and his inscription identifying himself and offering a brief reflection in classical Chinese. Self-portraits are rare in the late Japanese bunjinga (literati painting) tradition, and Tessai's example — produced when he was sixty-one, just as he was completing his transition from itinerant Shintō priest and traveling scholar to settled Kyoto painter — is one of the most direct visual statements of the bunjin ideal of the painter-scholar as inheritor of the Chinese literati tradition. The painting entered the Museum of Fine Arts in 1911 as part of the William Sturgis Bigelow bequest, which formed the foundation of Boston's pioneering holdings of Tessai's work and one of the most significant collections of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese nihonga and nanga in the United States.