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Follow the red stream from the surgeon’s hands into the wide dish below, then find Guan Yu, long-bearded and unmoved, leaning over his game.
Katsushika Ōi, Hokusai’s third daughter and, the Cleveland Museum of Art suggests, perhaps his most devoted pupil, painted this episode from the fourteenth-century Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A surgeon scrapes poison from the general Guan Yu’s arrow wound while his attendants cower, yet Guan Yu stays fixed on his board game. It is her largest surviving painting, signed “Brush of Ōi, the woman Ei.”
hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold on silk · Mounted: 206.7 x 73.1 cm · Cleveland Museum of Art
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Operating on Guan Yu's Arm
- Artist
- Katsushika Ōi (Japanese, c. 1800-after 1857)
- Date
- 1840s
- Medium
- hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold on silk
- Dimensions
- Mounted: 206.7 x 73.1 cm (81 3/8 x 28 3/4 in.); Painting: 140.2 x 68.3 cm (55 3/16 x 26 7/8 in.)
- Credit line
- Kelvin Smith Fund
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Ukiyo-e c. 1600–1900
View in the AtlasGaller’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.