Gibbons playing in oak trees, one of a pair

This work (1991.62.2) belongs to a pair of hanging scrolls, which were previously mounted on sliding door panels (fusuma). The faint circular traces at the edge of each reveal that they were once fitted with metal door pulls. This painting and its companion piece (1991.62.1) were likely part of a larger set of twelve or sixteen panel paintings that graced three or four walls of a room in the grand residence of a daimyo lord or in a temple. Two other panel paintings to the right of these would have completed the decor of one wall. These two scrolls in our collection are the only surviving examples of what must have been a significant set of mid-Edo period sliding door paintings.

The gibbons depicted here, often referred to as “monkeys,” are in fact a kind of ape with long arms and legs and no tail. Since they are not native to Japan, Japanese artists must have based their representations on imported images by Chinese painters such as Muqi (active late 1200s), found in Zen temples. Both apes and monkeys had positive associations that made them popular painting subjects for the decoration of samurai mansions and castles.

Each painting depicts two animals hanging from a large oak tree that extends from left to right across both scrolls. Here, one of the gibbons reaches its arm down in a pose strongly associated with a Zen Buddhist parable about a monkey that drowned while trying to reach down for the moon reflected in a pond below—a metaphor for the delusions of the unenlightened mind.