Two Divinities Dancing

Two Divinities Dancing is a hanging-scroll painting by Tomioka Tessai dated 1924 — the final year of the artist's life and at the height of his late, free-handed style — executed in ink and color on silk. The work is now held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession 11.7444), part of one of the strongest American collections of Tessai. The composition depicts two divinities in animated, eccentric postures, sketched in the rough calligraphic line and densely-packed brushwork that characterize Tessai's final decade; the figures are framed by an unusually long inscription in cursive script identifying them and meditating on their iconographic and literary associations. Tessai's last paintings, produced when he was in his eighty-seventh and eighty-eighth years, are widely regarded as a paradoxical climax of Japanese bunjinga (literati painting), produced at a moment when the tradition was on the verge of disappearing as a living practice: the brushwork is energetic and idiosyncratic, the inscriptions long and confident, and the iconography drawn from the deep store of Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist subjects that Tessai had accumulated over more than six decades of study. Boston's holding of late Tessai paintings, built up from the William Sturgis Bigelow bequest and subsequent gifts, is the principal American resource for studying this aspect of his work.