The Rakan Handaka Sonja with Dragon
Utagawa Hiroshige Japanese
Inscribed by Chōtei Kusumi
Not on view
This woodblock print design by the highly esteemed artist Utagawa Hiroshige shows a dragon magically emanating from the alms bowl of an arhat (disciple of Buddha) depicted in a hanging scroll. It is an extremely rare surviving example of a surimono, or privately published woodblock print, from early in Hiroshige’s career. Surimono like this one were often commissioned by poetry groups or individual poets—from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century—as a form of New Year’s greeting card. This print celebrated spring of the year of the dragon, 1820. To our knowledge, only two other impressions of this print survive, and it is a rarity among rarities from the corpus of the young Hiroshige, still in his early twenties when he created this.
The rakan Handaka Sonja (Sanskrit: Arhat Panthaka) is one of the sixteen disciples of Buddha often depicted together. Whether in paintings or netsuke carving he is usually shown accompanied by his pet dragon which he keeps in a bowl (as here) or in a gourd.
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