Artworks

Old Monkey

Artwork · Takamura Kōun · 1892 · sculpture · Tokyo National Museum

By Takamura Kōun (1852–1934), trained in traditional Buddhist image-making, who adapted wood carving to Western subjects; professor of sculpture at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō from 1889. An old but muscular monkey twists to the right, glaring upward and grasping a few feathers of a bird too quick to catch — carved from a single piece of horse-chestnut wood, the fur a mass of wavy curls; one of the masterpieces of Meiji sculpture. 1 Mason 2005, pp. 357–358, fig. 421. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.