Portrait of Ōzora Buzaemon

Portrait of Ōzora Buzaemon is a monumental hanging scroll of 1827 by Watanabe Kazan (渡辺崋山, 1793-1841), held in the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1980.177). Painted in ink and color on paper at an image height of 221.8 centimeters — well over two meters — it is one of Kazan's most ambitious finished portraits and a defining work of his Western-influenced portrait practice. Ōzora Buzaemon (1794-1832) was a celebrated giant from Sendai domain, reputed to stand more than seven feet tall, who toured Edo in the mid-1820s and became a popular sensation; Kazan painted him from life during this Edo tour, producing a portrait whose extraordinary scale itself documents the sitter's stature. The portrait fuses physiognomic specificity, soft tonal modeling, and an attention to costume detail drawn from Kazan's study of imported European engravings with the nanga conventions of the hanging-scroll format. The Cleveland scroll, acquired in 1980, is recognized as the single most important Kazan portrait in a Western collection and is among the touchstone works for understanding the late Edo cross-cultural portrait tradition that he pioneered.