In this series, Lagniappe presents works from the collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, with commentary from a curator.
A pair of folding screens on view in the Kurt A. Gitter, M.D., and Alice Yelen Gitter Gallery for Japanese art at the New Orleans Museum of Art presents a lively and engaging scene of scholars gathered together in a rural setting, enjoying drink and erudite conversation.
Painted by Yokoi Kinkoku (1761-1832), one of the great individualist painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Japan, he chose as his subject an 8th-century drinking poem by the Chinese poet Du Fu, "The Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup."
The poem documented an actual drinking club made up of eight Tang-dynasty scholars, famed for their capacity to consume copious amounts of alcohol. The red-robed fellow being dragged along, visible in this detail, is Li Bo, another of the greatest poets in Chinese history.
An aesthetic monk of the Shugendo sect, Kinkoku was an irreverent iconoclast who, due to his habitual drunkenness and disregard for orthodoxy, was removed from positions of authority in several monastic establishments.
Eventually, he found stability and notoriety in Shugendo, a syncretic religion that brought together Shinto mountain worship, Buddhism and folk religion.
Among its spiritual exercises was ritualized mountain climbing, thought to bring its practitioners supernatural power. Kinkoku is now recognized as an idiosyncratic and inventive painter, famous for his dense mountain landscapes, as well as lively figural depictions.