Lot 3085: HANABUSA ITCHO (1652-1724) TENGU (MOUNTAIN GOBLINS) Edo period (1615-1868)

HANABUSA ITCHO (1652-1724) TENGU (MOUNTAIN GOBLINS) Edo period (1615-1868), c. 1700 Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, depicting Ushiwakamaru (the young Yoshitsune) in the guise of a tengu and wearing a yamabushi (mountain monk) cap, assailing the real tengu of Mount Kurama in the branches of an enormous pine tree, observed by their king Sojobo who watches him from behind a fan, two junior tengu falling to the ground at the bottom of the scroll, inscribed with a poem and signed Fuji Nobuka ga, with one seal of the artist 35 x 12 1/2in (88.9 x 31.8cm)

At the very beginning of his military career, the charismatic, ill-fated hero Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159-1189) was sent, aged six, to a Buddhist temple in Kurama, a mountainous region north of Kyoto, where he resisted monastic discipline and would frequently escape to receive instruction from Sojobo, the great tengu of Kurama, in the martial skills that would enable him to destroy his family’s archenemy, the Taira clan. The tengu, monstrous creatures with crow-like beaks, are thought to have been inspired by the masks worn at ceremonies practiced in mountain temples by monks of the Shugendo sect, known as yamabushi. After completing his training at Kurama, Yoshitsune left the mountain in secret to fulfill his tragic destiny. The other disguised figure in this painting, depicted below the two tengu attacked by Yoshitsune, is perhaps the warrior-monk Benkei who would become the hero’s faithful companion, even though he normally enters the narrative after Yoshitsune’s return to Kyoto. The story of Yoshitsune, for much of his career an outcast from conventional society, was an ideal subject for the artist’s eleven years on the island of Miyake, where he was exiled as a punishment for lampooning the shogun’s concubine; it was not in fact until his return to Edo that he started using the name Itcho by which he is generally known today. For an Itcho painting of another historic exile, Tenjin (Sugawara no Michizane), also signed Fuji Nobuka, see Miriam Wattles, The Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa Itcho, Artist-Rebel of Edo, Leiden-/Boston, Brill, 2013, p. 64, fig. 25. A pair of hanging scrolls by Itcho depicting Mount Takao and Mount Kurama is in the University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts, inv. nos. 30 and 375.