Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Robe with Willow Tree and Chinese Characters
Not on view
Embroidered branches of willow, bursting into leaf at spring, cascade across the surface of this narrow-sleeved robe (kosode). The curved trunk of the tree is rendered through paste-resist dyeing and stenciling (hitta shibori). Chinese characters in semicursive script are rendered in orange silk embroidery thread or with couched gold threads. Three are found on the front of the garment and read: ki 気 (weather), ryū 柳 (willow), and kushikezu-ri 梳 (to comb). The four on the back read (right to left): hige 鬚 (whiskers), ha-rete 霽 (to clear), kaze 風 (wind), and shin 新 (new).
The characters are arranged randomly, but an erudite viewer of the time would have recognized part of a Chinese poem from the “Early Spring” section of the early eleventh-century collection Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing (Wakan rōeishū). The poem is in Chinese but was written by a Japanese courtier, Miyako no Yoshika (834–879), and can be transcribed into Japanese as:
Ki harete wa kaze shinryū no kami o kushikezuri,
kōri kiete wa nami kyūtai no hige o arau.
The weather clears, breezes comb the hair of the
young willows;
The ice is melting, wavelets wash the whiskers
of the old bog moss.
—Trans. Jonathan Chaves
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