The Legendary Empress Jingū by Hokushin Kosai

This is Hokushin Kosai's 'The Legendary Empress Jingū' (1850), and it's a miracle it still exists. The painting survived the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 because its owner buried it underground before the raids. Now in a museum collection, it carries both a myth and a survival story in its pigments.

Standing in layered white robes against a flat gold background, Jingū holds a tall ceremonial bow, a striking image in Edo-period Japan, where a woman of imperial rank depicted with a weapon was mythologically extraordinary. Below her, an attendant cradles a swaddled infant, almost certainly Emperor Ōjin, whom legend says Jingū kept unborn through a stone ritual during her Korean military campaign. The kneeling male figure with a fan and scroll acts as a civil witness, recording the moment for posterity.

The gold ground is a direct borrowing from Buddhist icon painting, applied here to Shinto legend. It lifts the figures out of ordinary time and places them in a mythic register. The artist, Hokushin Kosai (1824-1876), worked in a flat, unmodulated style with bright color and no strong shadow, a deliberate two-dimensionality that emphasizes line and ritual over realism.

So much of Edo-period art was lost to war and fire. This one was hidden in the earth and brought back into the light, a painted legend that almost became one itself.