Turtles

Turtles are auspicious animals in the East Asian tradition, said to live for ten thousand years. Here, Jakuchū rendered groups of them using the so-called sujime-gaki, or “white-line drawing,” technique, in which he carefully applied dark, wet brushstrokes to the paper in such a way as to leave a narrow, unpainted space between them, resembling a white line. The inscription, by the Confucian scholar and ethicist Kamata Hō, is a quatrain of seven-character lines:

靄々祥雲掛瑞嵐　千金之屋實堪妉
萬年龜壽成群到　況是行々七五三

As auspicious clouds fill the skies
and beneficent rain falls,
Staying at a house of abundance
is indeed enjoyable.
Long-lived turtles, ten thousand years old,
arrive in small groups,
One after another, just like this,
in clusters of seven, and five, and three.

Keeping in mind that child mortality was common in premodern Japan and raising healthy children the highest priority of any family, this work may have been commissioned to display on the Shichi-go-san, or Festival for Seven-, Five-, and Three-Year-Olds, when parents celebrate the special birthdays of little children (the numbers seven, five, and three, or shichi, go, and san, are considered lucky in Japanese folklore). The last line of the poem includes these numbers, and the artist cooperated by creating three clusters of turtles: seven at the top (including the two babies on the carapace of the largest turtle), five at the bottom right, and three at the middle left. We may assume, therefore, that both artist and calligrapher had the idea of Shichi-go-san in mind when they put brush to paper, even if at different times.

When signing the work, the artist apparently misremembered his age for a moment, then scribbled a “6” above “75” to correct the error, so that the signature ultimately reads “Painted by Old Man Beito at the age of 76.” Kano Hiroyuki suggests that someone trying to simulate a Jakuchū signature would never have been so brazen, meaning that only the artist himself could have made the annotation (Kyoto National Museum 2000, p. 354).

The round seal reading “Lay Buddhist devotee Jakuchū” is the one the artist cherished and used most, especially during his late career, but it also appears on works created by his pupils, so caution must be exercised in separating studio creations from those of the master. For reasons unknown, there has always been a break in the circular outline on the left side of this seal; a second break, on the right side, begins to appear in later works. The vertical rectangular seal above it, “Seal of Tō (Fuji[wara]),” was also a favorite of Jakuchū’s. Two additional seals, one at the beginning of the inscription and two at the end, were impressed by the calligrapher. The one at the upper right espouses the Confucian concept of “expressing one’s aspirations.”