Page 77 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

For centuries Japan’s cultured elite cultivated an intense
devotion to the art of poetry, nowhere more evident than in the waka court
poems inscribed on lavishly decorated poem cards (shikishi) by Rinpa painters

and calligraphers. Another manifestation of this phenomenon was the adulation
of great poets from Japan’s past, referred to collectively as the Poetic Immortals
(kasen). Along with the poems themselves, images of the Poetic Immortals were

of great appeal to the clientele of Rinpa artists from the time of Ogata Kōrin, in
the seventeenth century, into the modern age.
Imaginary portraits of poets, usually accompanied by representative poems, have
a long tradition in Japan. As far back as the thirteenth century, court artists painted
individual poets in codified groupings, such as the Six Poetic Immortals, the

Thirty-six Poetic Immortals, or the One Hundred Poets. The Six Poetic Immortals
(Rokkasen) were those mentioned by name in the first imperially commissioned
poetry anthology, Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (Kokin wakashū), published

in 905, even though not all of those poets would have been considered the most
talented or popular of their day. Nevertheless, these poets — or rather the concept
POE TS of a small constellation of poets, including the truly great mid-ninth century

woman poet Ono no Komachi — came to symbolize the entire enterprise of

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