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elegant composition of verse. In turn, the pictorial subject of a group portrait of
six poets, each shown in an identifiable pose or costume, became a favorite through
the ages.

The most esteemed roster of Japanese poets is the Thirty-six Poetic Immortals
(Sanjūrokkasen), a list of writers from the eighth to tenth century (comprising
five women and thirty-one men) compiled by the courtier-poet Fujiwara no

Kintō (966 – 1041) in the mid-1010s. Their poems were recognized as models by
future waka poets, and in later centuries updated variations of the list, such as
the Thirty-six Poetic Immortals of Medieval Times (Chūko sanjūrokkasen) and
Thirty-six Women Poets (Nyōbō sanjūrokkasen), were also compiled. The Ogura
Collection of a Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets (Ogura hyakunin isshu) is argu-

ably the most important poetry anthology in the Japanese canon. Anyone with
literary aspirations would have committed all of these waka to memory from a
young age, so that an allusion to any image or phrase from them would have been

immediately recognized: a shared cultural memory among all Japanese poets.
The collection was compiled by Fujiwara no Teika, a courtier-poet and the
literary arbiter of early medieval times, whose hermitage on Mount Ogura is
immortalized in the anthology’s title.
Painted and printed illustrated versions of poems by the Thirty-six Poetic

Immortals and the One Hundred Poets were immensely popular, and they became
a favorite theme of Rinpa artists. One of the earliest and most important is the
Kōetsu Edition of the Thirty-six Poetic Immortals (Kōetsu sanjūrokkasen), which fea-

tures calligraphy by or in the style of Hon’ami Kōetsu carved into woodblocks
for printing. Conventional poet portraits said to be based on earlier illustrations
by the court artist Tosa Mitsumochi (1496 – ca. 1559) accompany the texts (cat. 17).
Several editions of the volume were issued during the early seventeenth century,
helping to spread the canon of court poetry (which until that time had circulated

only in manuscript copies) as well as the revolutionary style of Kōetsu’s calligraphy.
Ogata Kōrin created numerous works on the theme of the Thirty-six Poetic
Immortals, including one that innovatively depicts all of the poets crowded

together in a single tableau, a format that became a template for future artists.
In 1815, Sakai Hōitsu reproduced Kōrin’s two-panel screen on the theme in his
woodblock-printed compendium One Hundred Paintings by Kōrin (Kōrin
hyakuzu) (cat. 18). A similar compilation, One Hundred Paintings of the Ogata
poets

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