Seating Order of Courtiers

Fifty-seven court nobles—twenty-nine in the upper row and twenty-eight in the lower—are arranged against a plain background. Traces of placards for each figure can be detected though none of the name cards have survived. Most of the figures here, however, have been identified through a comparison with other portrait collections, such as Tenshi sekkan miei (Portrait of Emperors, Regents, and Advisors; in the Imperial Household Agency’s Sannomaru Shozōkan (The Museum of the Imperial Collections)), which list individual names within the painting. On the top row, at the beginning of the scroll, the Regent Chancellor Fujiwara no Tadamichi (1097–1164) appears looking over to his right with his body towards the viewer. The remaining courtiers in the upper and lower rows include the ministers in order of appointment up to the Minister of Interior Kazan’in Sadamasa (1218–1294), who was appointed in 1252 (Kenchō 4). Seven courtiers, however, are missing between Kujō Yoshimichi (1167–1188), the twenty-fifth figure in the upper row, and Koga Michichika (1149–1202), the twenty-sixth figure also in the top row.
The bodies of the courtiers are renderedsimply in outline, though light colors have been applied to their mouths and faces. The use of fine thin lines in layers to convey the age and facial features of each figure makes this work a masterful nise-e (realistic portrait). The formal court robes that the nobles don have been left without color and decorated with unlikely motifs such as daikon radishes and turnips, which offer a glimpse into the playful nature hidden in nise-e and which suggest that this handscroll was not an official production but made as a study for nise-e painters.