Sumiyoshi School
Festival Procession at the Hiyoshi Shrine, 17th century
Six-panel folding screen; ink, mineral colors, and gold on paper with gold leaf
Size 53¾ x 122 in. (136.4 x 309.8 cm)
T-3695
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This lively depiction of mikoshi (festival floats) being carried in procession represents an important sub-category of the well-known genre of Rakuchū Rakugai zu byōbu 洛中洛外図屏風 (Screens of scenes in and...
This lively depiction of mikoshi (festival floats) being carried in procession represents an important sub-category of the well-known genre of Rakuchū Rakugai zu byōbu 洛中洛外図屏風 (Screens of scenes in and around Kyoto). Here the focus shifts to the Hiyoshi Taisha (Hiyoshi Grand Shrine) on the shores of Lake Biwa in Otsu, some 14 miles northeast of the old capital, where a lively festival, held on both land and water, has been celebrated each spring for more than 1,200 years. The Hiyoshi Shrine, depicted here at the top of the third panel from the right, with its torii (entrance archway) at the foot of the second panel, is defined by a great branch of the sacred evergreen sakaki tree (Cleyera japonica) lying on its side in a roofed pavilion with open sides. The sandō (ceremonial entranceway) is crammed with three large floats, each weighing more than a ton, being carried from the Shrine by boisterous teams of loincloth-clad young men, just as one can see in Japan today, while to the left on the fourth and fifth panels two further floats make their way toward the Lake. The rest of the screen's teeming composition is filled with other shrine and temple buildings and pine-clad hills, separated by gold clouds in the classic Tosa-school manner. Painting scholar Kanō Hiroyuki, introducing a similar screen in Kyoto's Konchi-in Temple, suggests that the style of the clouds, together with the painters' conscientious attention to detail, not just in the depiction of the festival's main activities but also in the many other scenes, points to a date in the middle of the seventeenth century.