Su Shi Riding a Donkey

The setting in this hanging scroll is minimally described. A few dry brushstrokes merely suggest the shape of the rocky bluff and the rough terrain, while the darker ink spots that define the trees and bamboo leaves on the ground accent the otherwise pale landscape. Attention is focused on the figure of a man on a donkey as he journeys on a path below the cliff. Here, too, details are minimal, a few lines defining the rider's face and robe, darker ink washes shaping his large hat and the beast's body. In this stark depiction, the thin gold lines that trace the hat and headcloth, the bridle bit, and other details give an unexpected sense of luxury.

The image of a man riding on a donkey, a poor man's conveyance, symbolized the eremitic life of a scholar-poet and became a favorite subject among the ink painters of the Muromachi period. The riders that appear in such paintings are variously identified, often as Du Fu or Su Shi but sometimes as other poets of China. The Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu (712–770) was a favorite in fourteenth-century Japan. Later, his popularity was overshadowed by that of Su Shi (Su Dongpo, 1037–1101), a Song-dynasty poet whose work found an appreciative audience among Zen monks in the fifteenth century.[1]

In this painting the rider's large hat, its windswept ribbons, and the forlorn look of the landscape suggest that the poet is traveling through rain. If so, the painting may belong to a special iconographic type in which Su Shi is represented wearing a rain hat and wooden clogs, as he is in a scroll attributed to Tenshō Shūbun (fl. 1414–before 1463) in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.' The scroll illustrates an incident that took place while Su Shi was in exile at the end of his life, on Hainan Island, off South China. As he took leave of a friend he was visiting, it began to rain and Su Shi borrowed a bamboo hat and wooden clogs from a farmer. The strange sight of a scholar-official from the city plodding through the rain dressed in a humble farmer's outfit startled the women and children whom he met along the way and made them laugh.

Bōkudo Sōjun (1373–1459), the painter of the Burke scroll, was a Zen monk at Tenryūji, Kyoto, a center of learning and home to many scholarly monk-poets, who wrote poetic colophons on a large number of paintings. One of the monks at Tenrūyji, Zuikei Shūhō (1391–1473), mentions in his diary a visit made by Bōkudo to the temple, noting that the painter excelled in images of Fudo Myōō (Skt: Achala) and other ferocious guardian deities.[3] It is not unlikely that these paintings were also highlighted in gold, just like the figure of the poet in the present painting. The use of gold outlines in otherwise austere Buddhist images was a practice particularly favored by the professional painters of the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century, painters such as Minchō, Ryōzen, and Reisai, who were closely associated with Tōfukuji. It is not unlikely that Bōkudo learned this technique from the paintings in the Tōfukuji collection.


[Miyeko Murase 2000, Bridge of Dreams]

[1] Haga Kōshirō 1981, pp. 284–85; and Shimada Shūjirō and lriya Yoshitaka 1987, p. 162.
[2] Reproduced in Shimada Shūjirō 1969, vol. 1, pl. 78. Another painting attributed to Shūbun depicting the poet walking in the rain wearing a hat and wooden clogs is reproduced in Watanabe Hajime 1985, fig. 61. For Tani Bunchō's copies of similar works, see "Honchō gasan" 1939, p. 204.
[3]. Guan nikkenroku (Chronicle of Guan), in Shiseki shūran 1967–68, vol. 3.

Signature: Bokudo

Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation , New York (until 2015; donated to MMA)

Richmond. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. "Jewel Rivers: Japanese Art from The Burke Collection.," October 25, 1993–January 2, 1994.

Santa Barbara Museum of Art. "Jewel Rivers: Japanese Art from The Burke Collection.," February 26, 1994–April 24, 1994.

Minneapolis Institute of Arts. "Jewel Rivers: Japanese Art from The Burke Collection.," October 14, 1994–January 1, 1995.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Masterpieces of Japanese Art from The Mary Griggs Burke Collection," March 30–June 25, 2000.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Celebrating the Arts of Japan: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection," October 20, 2015–May 14, 2017.

Murase, Miyeko, Il Kim, Shi-yee Liu, Gratia Williams Nakahashi, Stephanie Wada, Soyoung Lee, and David Sensabaugh. Art Through a Lifetime: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection. Vol. 1, Japanese Paintings, Printed Works, Calligraphy. [New York]: Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, [2013], p. 80, cat. no. 101.