1844
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Operating on Guan Yu's Arm is a 1844 unspecified by Katsushika Ōi, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This painting shows Guan Yu, a Chinese general, sitting calmly as doctors clean a deep arrow wound on his arm. Blood drips onto a white cloth while his attendants look away in horror. Ōi uses bright reds and whites to make the scene feel urgent and real. The artist gives Guan Yu a calm face even as his body suffers. It’s a rare ukiyo-e print that focuses on shock and tension instead of beauty. Look for more like this at The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Ukiyo-e artists’ subject matter extended to popular literature. Katsushika Ōi used color to great effect in her gruesome version of an episode from a 14th-century Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Ōi portrayed the passage in which legendary 3rd-century military leader Guan Yu undergoes a bone scraping to remove poisons received from an arrow wound. In this sensationalist portrayal, Guan Yu’s attendants cower at the sight of his bloody arm while he remains unflinchingly focused on his game. As a woman, Ōi was an outlier in her era, but her talent was allowed to shine due to…
This is the largest surviving painting by the artist.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Katsushika Ōi (葛飾 応為, c. 1800 – c. 1866), also known as Ei (栄; or O-Ei (お栄) with the honorific prefix) or Ei-jo (栄女; lit. 'woman Ei'), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the early 19th century Edo period. She was a…
See the richer artist page
