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Lineage (Ogata-ryū hyakuzu), also includes portraits of the Thirty-six Poetic
Immortals, beginning with the revered poet laureate of ancient times, Kakinomoto
no Hitomaro (d. ca. 710), whose portraits were often displayed at poetry gather-

ings into the early modern era (cat. 22).
Two of the most notable Rinpa artists of the modern age, Kamisaka Sekka and
Ikeda Koson, refreshed the poet-portrait theme in their respective painted rendi-

tions of the Thirty-six Poetic Immortals (cats. 19, 20). Sekka, who brilliantly
reinterpreted the entire Rinpa repertoire of motifs in his woodblock-printed
volume Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa), represented the theme of the
Six Poetic Immortals in the form of close-up bust portraits set within the shape
of a fan (cat. 21). A remarkable modern vestige of this tradition can be seen in

an early twentieth-century man’s silk robe on which the motif is meticulously
rendered by paste-resist dyeing (cat. 23).

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