The Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup

The Momoyama period marks the political unification of Japan and the end to nearly one hundred years of continual warfare. Enjoying the relative stability and improved economic climate of the country, rulers, warriors, aristocrats, and the emerging merchant class spent lavishly on pleasurable pursuits, building, and decorative arts. Enormous and ostentatious castles and villas demanded equally impressive wall-panel paintings and folding screens. To light the massive interiors of these new buildings, the uniquely Japanese technique of applying strong mineral colors to gold leaf came into fashion.

These screens, painted around 1600 by an anonymous artist, take their theme from a classical eighth-century Chinese poem, "Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup." It portrays the geniality and excessive drinking of eight members of high society, including a prince, a prime minister, a Buddhist monk, a Daoist, poets, and artists. The poem describing their decadence is meant to be read as a protest against accepted rules of decorum and social behavior.

In subsequent generations, the identity of the eight revelers became legendary, and the subject became popular in both Chinese and Japanese painting. The use of the tree, screen, tables, and chairs as characteristically Chinese compositional devices suggests that the Japanese artist based these screens on an actual Chinese model. The elegantly detailed and colorful garments worn by the gentlemen, however, are indicative of the high level of manufacture of and interest in sumptuous clothes by the Japanese at the turn of the seventeenth century.

"Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection," pages 42-43