Su Dongpo

Su Dongpo (蘇東坡) is a hanging-scroll painting by Tomita Keisen in ink and color on silk, held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 13215.1) and dating from the Taishō period (about 1920). Su Dongpo (1037-1101, also known as Su Shi) was the great Northern Song poet, calligrapher, official, and gastronome whose exile to Huangzhou and Hangzhou produced some of the most celebrated lyric and prose writing of the Chinese tradition, including the two Red Cliff fu and an immense corpus of shi and ci poems. He became one of the central culture-heroes of the East Asian literati world and a frequent subject of Chinese and Japanese painting from the Song dynasty onward, especially among nanga (Southern School) painters in Edo and Meiji Japan. Keisen, who continued to read classical Chinese poetry as a private discipline throughout his life, painted Su Dongpo as a representative literatus in keeping with the long nanga tradition of subject choice. The painting is a sober, dignified portrait in which the figure is rendered with careful line and gentle color against largely unmodulated ground, demonstrating the kind of restraint that distinguishes Keisen's literati-themed work from the more elaborate decorative manner he reserved for landscape screens.