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Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals

Tatebayashi Kagei

1704

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Baroque Ukiyo-e 18th Century Allegory

Dominant colour

Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals is a 1704 unspecified by Tatebayashi Kagei, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Tatebayashi Kagei
When & what style?: 1704 · Baroque
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a six-panel folding screen filled with tiny poets in robes, each standing under a pine tree with a poem floating beside them. These aren’t real people together—they lived hundreds of years apart. The artist jammed them into one imaginary party to celebrate Japan’s most loved poets. The poems are short, just 31 syllables, but they were the pop lyrics of the day. Look up *Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)* to see how artists turned poetry into pictures.

The story of this work

Overview

Fujiwara no Kintō (996–1075), a Japanese courtier, scholar, and poet, compiled select examples by the most celebrated composers of 31-syllable poems ( waka ) from the 600s to the 1000s. Painters soon made these “thirty-six poetic immortals” a favorite subject, traditionally presenting the poets in sequential, idealized portraits paired with their poems. In this interpretation, a chronologically impossible gathering of these great talents is in progress. The screen’s composition follows one devised by design virtuoso Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716).