Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Minamoto no Yorimasa Aiming an Arrow
Katsushika Hokusai Japanese
Not on view
This painting shows the most famous tale about Minamoto no Yorimasa who recounts his slaying of the mythical nue, a monster reputed to have a head like a monkey, limbs like a tiger, and tail like a snake. Recorded in the fourteenth-century war epic The Tale of the Heike, the story relates that the emperor, sickened by the nue’s wailing night after night in a ghostly voice echoing from dense black clouds that blotted out the sky, begged Yorimasa to rid him of this monster.
Hokusai has painted Yorimasa with his bow fully drawn, his body braced in battle stance, and his gaze fully concentrated on firing the single arrow that will kill his enemy. Hokusai only intimates its menace through the sinister black clouds that swirl around Yorimasa and the two flashes of red lightning that descend to threaten him.
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