- Museum number
- 1931,1116,0.1.3
- Title
- Object: Shotoku taishi eden 聖徳太子絵伝 (Pictorial Biography of Prince Shotoku)
- Description
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Painting, one of nine sections from a handscroll depicting episodes in the life of Prince Shotoku (Shotoku Taishi): At age thirty-seven, Prince Shotoku confined himself within Yumedono Hall (or Rokkakudo Hall), constructed when he was sixteen. Ink and colour on paper.
- Production date
- 16thC(early)
- Dimensions
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Height: 32.80 centimetres
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Width: 60.50 centimetres
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- Curator's comments
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See Basil Gray, 'A Sixteenth Century Tosa Roll' in British Museum Quarterly VI:4 (1932), pp. 100-1, pl. XLI
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Smith et al 1990
The series of sections of scenes from the life of Shotoku came to the British Museum mounted as a handscroll, but later study has shown it to be far from complete and perhaps not originally in handscroll format at all. It is more likely to be assembled from both handscroll sections and also sections cut from one or more large episodic hanging scrolls, on the subject of the Prince's life, which would have been displayed to the faithful on commemorative days. In that state the sections would have been arranged in vertical bands; this is a type which has survived in many Japanese temple collections.
Because of the need to explain the events to the less well-informed, small written paper cartouches have been fixed to the surface to identify the episodes. The section illustrated shows the birth of the Prince, and his praying for his father at the age of four. Since they are not in right-to-left chronological order, this section certainly does not come from a continuous handscroll. This is one of the finest early examples in the British Museum's collection of the narrative pictorial tradition in Yamato-e style (Smith et al 1990, pp. 50-2). For the significance of Shotoku see 1961,0408,01.
FURTHER READING
Nara National Museum, 'Shotoku Taishi e-den', Nara, 1969
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Zwalf 1985
Two scenes from a handscroll life of Shōtoku Taishi depict (left) the thirty-five-year-old prince lecturing amidst a shower of lotus petals on the ‘Shōmangyō’ (‘Queen Śrīmālā's Sūtra’), a text of One-Vehicle teaching, and (right) a scene from the prince's childhood captioned 'six-year-old prince'. This may refer to the gift of ‘sūtras’ from Paekche in Korea, with whose help the seven-year-old Shōtoku tried to persuade the Emperor Bidatsu to institute days in each month on which it was forbidden to kill animals. This scroll is unusual in showing scenes out of chronological sequence.
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Hizo Nihon bijutsu taikan Vol 2
Prince Shotoku left an important mark on Japanese history; he was responsible for promoting the spread of Buddhism, and personally demonstrated outstanding abilities in such varied fields as politics, thought, and culture. He had not been dead long before he was accorded divine attributes and treated as an object of worship. Eventually, statues and pictures were produced, and the numerous episodes related concerning his life - some true, some fictitious, but all designed to emphasize his superhuman qualities - were compiled into a biography that depicted him as a deified figure.
The 'Shotoku Taishi Eden' are pictorial representations of this biography. According to the 'Taishiden Kokin Mokurokusho' (A Catalogue of 'Shotoku Taishi Eden' Past and Present), among other sources, one example is known to have been painted in the Edo (Picture Hall) of Shitennoji temple in Osaka as early as the Tenpyo Shoho era (749-57). The earliest extant works are the panel paintings done in the first year of the Enkyu era (1069), during the Heian period, in order to embellish the interior of the Edo Picture Hall of Horyuji (Horyuji Treasure House, Tokyo National Museum; see illustration).
The two works just mentioned, executed for two temples known to have had especially close relationships with the prince, are special cases; they were, in a sense, commemorative by nature and inseparable from the buildings they graced. Large wall areas were available for the depiction of the prince's life, and the works are believed to have adhered to the traditional manner of narrative painting transmitted from the continent. In the Kamakura period, on the other hand, the spread of Shotoku worship led to the production of many pictorial biographies in the hanging-scroll format, their large numbers attesting to the popularity of the cult. Written records indicate that lectures on the above-mentioned Shitennoji murals and Horyuji panel paintings were given to specific persons, and it seems certain that these hanging-scroll paintings frequently provided matter for sermons to a wider public.
Unlike murals or sliding-screen paintings, hanging scrolls can be transported freely from place to place, and larger surfaces can be created by hanging a number of scrolls side by side - practical advantages that gave the form great popularity and encouraged its development. Large numbers of such paintings survive from the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, notable examples being the four-scroll version handed down in Horyuji (now in the Tokyo National Museum) and the eight-scroll version in Tachibana-dera. The same period also saw production of handscroll versions of the life of Shotoku. While such handscroll versions made it possible to grasp episodes of the story in a predetermined order while reading the text that alternated with the pictures, they could not be viewed by large numbers of people at the same time, and so were not as effective in spreading the cult as the hanging-scroll versions. Surviving examples are correspondingly fewer.
The work in the British Museum originally took the form of a single handscroll, but the scenes have since been mounted on nine separate sheets. The achievements of the prince's life are presented in fragmentary form, which suggests that the extant pictures represent remnants of a larger original. While a majority of the episodes concern the prince's relatively early years, some scenes mix in episodes from his later years also. Careful examination of the pictures shows that painting fragments have been put together in an unnatural way, which suggests that the original may have been a damaged hanging scroll that was cut up and reassembled in handscroll format. The markedly unsophisticated style of the whole - the awkward postures of the human figures, the stiff brush work of the robe folds, and the simple colouring - may well indicate that it is the work of a late-Muromachi-period painter who stood somewhat apart from the orthodox 'yamato-e' lineage.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
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Exhibited:
2009 Feb 18-Jun 15, BM Japanese Galleries, 'Japan from Prehistory to Present'
2019 Apr - Nov, BM, Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries
- Acquisition date
- 1931
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- 1931,1116,0.1.3
- Additional IDs
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Asia painting number: Jap.Ptg.Add.85 (Japanese Painting Additional Number)