The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (Chikurin shichiken), from the series "A Set of Ten Famous Numbers for the Katsushika Circle (Katsushikaren meisu juban)"

The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (Chikurin shichiken), from Yashima Gakutei's series A Set of Ten Famous Numbers for the Katsushika Circle (Katsushikaren meisu juban), is a [surimono](/glossary/surimono) of 1823 in the Art Institute of Chicago. The Set of Ten Famous Numbers pairs each cardinal number with a celebrated group from Chinese or Japanese tradition - groups of three, five, seven, and so on - and uses them as occasions for kyoka verses commissioned by the Katsushika poetry circle. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were third-century Chinese literati who withdrew from court politics to drink, debate, and improvise poetry in a bamboo grove, and they remained for centuries the East Asian archetype of the cultivated recluse. To choose them as the seven of the surimono series was therefore to put the literati ideal at the heart of the project. Yashima Gakutei, a leading surimono designer of the Hokusai school under Katsushika Hokusai, places the sages within a stylized grove using a restrained palette and the careful drawing that the school's Chinese subjects demanded. Deluxe surimono techniques - mineral pigments tuned in close harmonies, blind embossing of robes and bamboo nodes, and burnished metallic accents on prestige details - register the sheet's status. The kyoka verses alongside it would have allowed the Katsushika circle to position itself as a contemporary descendant of the sages, an Edo grove of poets at home in a printed bamboo wood.