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New Acquisitions June 1 (Wednesday) to July 3 (Sunday), 2005 The Collections Hall, Galleries 17 The Kyoto National Museum annually acquires new artworks to enrich its collection. This past year, forty objects were purchased and three donated. Among these new acquisitions, four works are nationally designated, including Dragon Gate (Important Art Object) by Maruyama Okyo (1733-95) and Segment of Letters by Emperor Gofukakusa (Important Cultural Property), the work that will be introduced here. Emperor Gofukakusa (1243-1304) stands out among the Japanese emperors as having left a large body of calligraphic works, many of which consist of correspondence. This hanging scroll, executed with powerful brushstrokes in light black ink, reveals the emperor's character. What appears to be one missive is, in actuality, two separate manuscripts with different contents, which were mounted together later as a single work. This occurred because most of the emperor's existing correspondence, including these two missives, were originally used to copy the Lotus Sutra, Scroll 8 (Important Cultural Property, Kyoto National Museum) after the his death. Later, the letter sides, written on the front of the paper, were peeled apart from the sutra copied onto the back of the letters. The letters were then reformatted separately, while the back sutra sections, which were removed from the letters, were put back together again as a single scroll. The two letters here that now make up this hanging scroll appears to have come from this set. The character for the number "seven" inscribed on the back, left half of the hanging scroll, indicates that this page was meant to be sheet seven for a volume of the Lotus Sutra. Interestingly, the Kyoto National Museum has another letter by Emperor Gofukakusa in the form of a handscroll (designated an Important Cultural Property), which appears to have been part of the right half of this letter.
Furong shi (J., fuyo seki), literally "cotton-rose stone," also known as "lotus-shaped rock," refers to a viewing stone that stood in the government office of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, in China, during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The preface to Tian Rucheng's (act. 1500-1570) Xihu youlan zhi (Travelogue of West Lake), volume 15, dated Jiajing 26 (1547), indicates that the Nanshan garrison was formerly the back garden of the Song (960-1279) palace Deshougong, which was established as an overseas trade office by imperial order during the Yongle era (1403-24). In the arbor was a beautiful, lustrous lotus-shaped rock with elegant round holes, measuring over three meters in height. In the Jiajing era (1522-66), this complex became the municipal office of Nanguan District.
In the winter of Tianqi 1 (1621), Yang Shikong, a Nanguan government official, discovered this rock, placed within the arbor of the government building, and had it painted and with his colleagues inscribed poems lauding the rock. In the ninth month of Tianqi 2, Yang commissioned Zhang Erbao, an artist from Shanfin (Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province), to copy the large rock from the four directions of north, south, east, and west. In the winter of the same year, Yang composed ten poems inspired by this rock, giving it various appellations--meng shi ("dream rock"), zhi shi ("intoxicated rock"), xue shi ("snow rock"), ("moon rock"), yu shi ("rain rock"), qin shi ("zither rock"), bai shi ("prayer rock"), sou shi ("washing rock"), wo shi ("resting rock"), and deng shi ("lamp rock"). He also invited local Zhejiang literati Xu Xiangmei and Huang Ruxiang, and visiting literatus Mi Wanzhong, to compose poems praising the furong shi to inscribe onto this painting. Although the appreciation of extraordinary rocks, which symbolized nature's formative beauty, dates back to as early as the Tang dynasty (618-907), this painting serves as a rare record of the culture of rock appreciation in Huangzhou during the Ming dynsaty.
TOWARDS THE END OF THE MIDDLE YAYOI PERIOD (c. 100 B.C. -A.D. 100), various centers of dotaku production began to create distinctive ritual bronze bells in Japan. Among such bells include a style of bronze bell with crossed bands (J., kesadasuki-mon dotaku), which has horizontal bands with diagonal lattices in its upper half and graceful linked spiral wave patterns in its lower half. This bell here represents the kesadasuki-mon dotaku with divided bands (J., otai bunkatsu gata, "divided-band type")
In Setouchi, near the inland sea, a type of flat bronze sword, decorated with a similar wave-patterned band, was found indicating that the smiths in this area who produced this type of bell with divided bands also forged these flat swords. This overlap in distribution shows that eastern Setouchi may have been the area of production for the bells with divided bands.
The "Divided Band-type" Dotaku with Crossed Bands in Six Divisions can moreover be largely classified in two styles-A without decorative "ears" on the flange and B, which has three "ears." B can be further divided into B1 with the usual single-band flange and B2 with an ornate double-band flange, indicating that these styles may have evolved from type A to B1 to B2. This example falls under the category of B1 and closely resembles a bell that was unearthed during a road construction near the foothills of Mount Minami Iyayama in Mihama, Fukui Prefecture in 2001. However, the vertical band of this bell has a line dividing it in half, while the bell from the Minami Iyayama site does not have this distinctive pattern, suggesting that the latter bell was produced somewhat earlier.
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