Colorful Realm of Living Beings

Introduction

Colorful Realm of Living Beings (動植綵絵, Dōshoku sai-e) is a group of thirty paintings in colour on silk made by Itō Jakuchū over roughly a decade in the middle of the eighteenth century. It is not one panoramic painting, a book of printed plates or a run of later copies. Each hanging scroll is a separate physical object. Together they present birds, plants, fish, insects and shells with astonishing shifts of scale and attention. The Agency for Cultural Affairs' National Treasure record ^[1] names all thirty, supplies their dimensions, and reconstructs the making and donation of the group. The Museum of the Imperial Collections ^[2] now catalogues them under one group number with thirty linked child records.

The thirty were given in stages to Shōkokuji, a Kyoto Buddhist monastery, with Jakuchū's separate Śākyamuni triptych. The holding museum ^[2] says the paintings and triptych were used together in ceremonies. The National Gallery of Art's 2012 exhibition ^[4] reunited them in Washington after conservation. That setting changes how we read the exuberant flowers and animals: they were made for a religious institutional space as well as for close visual pleasure. Their ecological abundance need not be reduced to a secular catalogue of species.

This guide provides a route into the actual set. Its interactive index keeps every official Japanese title, museum date wording, dimensions and child-object link together. A title can be browsed by depicted subject or broad production phase, but the catalogue's number order is not proof of the order in which Jakuchū painted every scroll. The artist home compares other Jakuchū media, and the biography follows the documented life in which this commission took shape. Here the emphasis is on what thirty scrolls make possible that one celebrated rooster cannot show.

What exactly is in the set?

Why thirty paintings matter

The series is easier to grasp when its number is taken seriously. Thirty similarly scaled silk surfaces could create an environment around the Śākyamuni triptych. The Shōzōkan record ^[2] describes the group as thirty hanging scrolls, each roughly 142 centimetres high and around 79–80 centimetres wide according to the official measurements ^[1]. Their consistency of format gives the viewer a rhythm; the variety of subject interrupts any expectation that one image will simply repeat the next. A flowering plant may dominate one field, several birds another, and fish or insects another. What looks like a catalogue of nature is also a carefully designed succession of densely and sparsely occupied surfaces.

The Japanese title joins animals and plants. Its exact wording is explained in the Agency for Cultural Affairs record ^[1] through Jakuchū's donation letter rather than an assumed modern exhibition label. One can translate it as Colorful Realm of Living Beings to convey the scope of flora and fauna, while retaining Dōshoku sai-e because English alternatives vary. The term “bird-and-flower painting” describes an East Asian genre, but this set reaches beyond birds and flowers to fish, shells, insects and even the flow of water. The official inventory lets us see that range before interpreting any single colour.

The set was not produced in a single burst. The earliest dated member belongs to 1758, but the official explanation ^[1] says work had begun earlier. Twelve were finished by 1761. Jakuchū gave twenty-four with the triptych in 1765 and completed all thirty by November 1766. The museum's individual catalogue labels reflect stages: some are given an exact year, others “by 1761,” “before 1765,” or “around 1766.” This does not make the thirty museum labels equivalent to thirty dated signatures. The interactive phase filter is a reading aid based on those labels. It must not be used to claim the exact order of every brushstroke.

The official account also discusses possible commemorative motives connected with family deaths and the memory of his father. Its 1770 reference to tablets for Jakuchū and his parents anchors one later act of remembrance. It does not establish a single psychological trigger for all ten years of making. The more secure relationship is material and institutional: the paintings were given to Shōkokuji, were displayed with a Buddhist triptych, and were conserved and catalogued as a related group. Motive can be explored without turning probability into a quotation from Jakuchū's mind.

The index: a path through exact objects

The index below begins with the Agency for Cultural Affairs' thirty-title inventory ^[1]. Each title has been checked against a separately numbered Sannomaru Shōzōkan child record ^[2]. A row shows the Japanese title, its museum date label and the measured silk painting, then opens that exact child page for the museum image, fuller metadata and catalogue context. The Japanese title is retained even in English because translations such as “rooster,” “fowl,” “chickens,” or “birds” can blur distinctions in the collection. The rows are source records, not thirty commissioned article pages.

Three controls answer three different looking questions. All thirty shows the complete catalogue order. Birds and flowers, water and fish, and insects and shells let a reader discover subject patterns in the title strings. These are editorial subject tags, not biological identifications: a scroll containing a plant and a bird can reasonably be associated with more than one theme. Museum date band follows the institution's broad labels rather than reassigning exact year numbers. When a visitor filters to the six around 1766, the result describes the museum's catalogue dating for that group; it does not mean all six were painted in a known six-month sequence.

The first child record, Peonies and Butterflies / 芍薬群蝶図, SZK002949-001 ^[6], is dated around 1757–58 by the museum. Small Birds in Plum Blossoms / 梅花小禽図, -002 ^[7] carries its 1758 label. Early members put blossom, branch and animal in a vertical field rather than treating each creature as a specimen isolated against white. The NGA account ^[4] uses Peonies and Butterflies to describe colour layered on both sides of silk, a technique that gives a particular surface depth. Daiten Kenjō gave that scroll a poetic title in 1760. The poetic title is evidence of a later act of naming, not a date for the first brush mark.

At the other end, Various Fish / 諸魚図, -027 ^[10] and Group of Fish / 群魚図, -028 ^[11] both have museum labels around 1766. They make the “bird-and-flower” shorthand look too narrow. The Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties ^[5] studied blue passages in these two and found materially different results in named fish. The paintings ask for individual looking and technical caution even while belonging to one devotional scheme.

Four ways the titles change the view

The inventory is dense with birds, but it does not present a single repeated bird template. Six consecutive child records early in the series, Sunflower and Rooster, -005 ^[12] through Parrot beneath an Old Pine, -012 ^[14], bring different plants, species and groupings into the same vertical format. Some titles identify a pair, others a flock or a single bird. This variation matters because a common subject label can flatten differences of scale, movement and setting. The subject filter deliberately gathers works by a word in their title; it invites visitors to open the actual records and see whether the category remains useful when faced with each composition.

The plant names deserve an equally close reading. Plum, sunflower, hydrangea, hibiscus, pine, palm, rose and peony appear across the official thirty-title list ^[1]. They do not all serve as interchangeable floral frames. A pine can anchor a more enduring vertical structure, while a flowering branch may scatter attention among small shapes; a broad leaf can occupy area differently from a tangle of stems. These are compositional possibilities raised by the titles, not a claim that each species has one fixed symbolism in every scroll. The museum images should be checked before making a precise statement about how a particular stalk or branch turns.

Water expands the set's visual world beyond the air around birds. Fish Swimming in a Lotus Pond, -017 ^[15], Various Fish, -027 ^[10], Group of Fish, -028 ^[11] and Chrysanthemums and Running Water, -029 ^[16] all have water or fish in their official Japanese titles. They belong to different museum date bands and need not make the same kind of space. The technical study of fish colour supplies one way to compare -027 and -028; the titles of the lotus and chrysanthemum scrolls prompt a different question about water as environment or movement. A filter that exposes these four together makes that change in subject easy to investigate.

Small creatures have a particular effect on looking. Peonies and Butterflies, -001 ^[6], Insects beside a Pond, -023 ^[17] and Shells, -024 ^[18] are the three titles selected by the “insects and shells” button. The filter does not claim there are no insects or shells visible elsewhere; it uses explicit title cues. Such subjects reward a different distance from the scroll than a large rooster silhouette. The Agency for Cultural Affairs ^[1] emphasizes the coexistence of meticulous observation and deliberate design, which is especially helpful here. An insect can be rendered as a recognisable living form while still serving a carefully balanced pattern.

These four subject routes overlap. The butterfly scroll is also about peonies, the lotus scroll is also about plants, and the title of a bird-and-flower painting may name only one visible part of its scene. The counts shown by the filter should therefore not be added as if they partitioned all thirty into mutually exclusive boxes. They are reading prompts built from catalogue words. This is one reason the index remains linked to the child records: the label brings a reader to the object, while the object can challenge the label.

Dates, order and installation are different questions

An index presents one scroll after another, but an eighteenth-century temple visitor encountered hanging paintings in a space. The current group record ^[2] establishes ritual use with the Śākyamuni triptych and records later exhibition histories. It does not by itself give a complete plan of the original wall-by-wall arrangement, a guaranteed left-to-right order or a list of which scrolls hung on each ceremonial day. A digital grid or numerical catalogue is an efficient research tool; treating it as a photograph of the historic installation would be an unsupported reconstruction. This page therefore makes no diagram purporting to restore the temple room.

The same caution applies to dates. The government's account ^[1] has strong set-level anchors: earlier than 1758 for the start, twelve by 1761, a twenty-four-scroll gift in 1765, and completion of thirty by November 1766. Seven scrolls have dates in inscriptions. The individual museum child records ^[2] give useful scholarly labels for each painting, but a label “before 1765” leaves years open, and a label “around 1766” is deliberately approximate. The index's early, middle and late controls reproduce those broad museum groupings. A change in filter does not amount to evidence for the order of composition within a band.

This matters when discussing artistic development. It is tempting to line up the first and thirtieth record and narrate a steady evolution from observation to abstraction, or from one pigment to another. The technical study finds a materially different red in a pair of similar suns and specific blue materials in fish scrolls; those are powerful comparisons. Yet a thirty-object series can include experimentation, return to an earlier motif and parallel work. The evidence supports a long project and identifiable changes in sampled passages. It does not require a single inevitable “early style” and “late style” for every subject. A reader can ask where a comparison is local to two works and where an argument truly encompasses the set.

What conservation reveals about colour

The conservation campaign that informed the 2012 Washington exhibition also opened the paintings to technical study. A 2013 report by Hayakawa Yasuhiro at the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties ^[5] describes non-contact X-ray fluorescence analysis of all thirty during the 1999–2004 treatment programme. The team took 919 measurement points. Seventeen scrolls could be examined from both front and back, while thirteen were examined only from the front. That uneven access matters: an absence of evidence for reverse painting in a front-only record is not proof that the reverse has no colour.

X-ray fluorescence detects elements, not the name of an intact paint recipe. Hayakawa explains that it is poor at detecting organic dyes and that layered colours can combine signals from the front and reverse of a thin silk support. A measured copper signal, for example, cannot alone distinguish every blue or green copper pigment. The researchers combined elemental evidence with visible-light spectroscopy and other observations for particular questions. This limitation is more informative than a simple list of “all the pigments Jakuchū used,” because it shows which claims are measurements and which are interpretation.

The report identifies calcium-rich white throughout the thirty, most plausibly gofun, a shell-derived white, rather than lead white. It describes mercury-rich reds in many scrolls, and a slightly different mercury-plus-lead red in several late members. One tightly grounded comparison sets the red sun in White Rooster under an Old Pine / 老松白鶏図, -011 ^[8] beside the similar sun in White Phoenix under an Old Pine / 老松白鳳図, -025 ^[9]. The detected elemental mix differs, and the latter appears more orange. This is a comparison of two sampled passages, not a claim that every red in scroll 25 differs from every red in scroll 11.

The fish studies are even more surprising. In Group of Fish, -028 ^[11], the institute reports evidence supporting Prussian blue in the blue of a particular grouper and azurite in a smaller fish. In Various Fish, -027 ^[10], it identifies indigo in a bonito. This statement depends on the combined analytical methods described in the study and applies to the passages named there. It does not mean all blue in Colorful Realm is Prussian blue. The differences make a point the naked-eye category “blue fish” would hide: colours with similar appearance could have different material histories.

Images, ownership and object identity

Jakuchū's death in 1800 did not end the thirty scrolls' own history. The official National Treasure record ^[1] traces them from Shōkokuji to the imperial household in 1889 and the state in 1989, with National Treasure designation in 2021. The holding museum's group record ^[2] also lists a donation letter and a one-line calligraphy by Baisaō among the attached materials. That documentation is part of the set's catalogued context; it should not be counted as two additional nature paintings. An accession, a donor document, a photograph and a later reproduction are four different things.

The set has had different public lives. The Shōzōkan exhibition history ^[2] records complete presentations in Japan, the 2012 Washington show and a 2018 Paris exhibition, alongside displays of selected scrolls. Exhibition lists tell us what was shown where and when. They do not transfer ownership to the host museum, and they do not turn a press image into a reusable file. The 2012 NGA page ^[4] describes a rare reunion with the separate Śākyamuni triptych; the NGA did not become owner of the thirty.

The Museum of the Imperial Collections' photo policy ^[3] requires an application for reproduction of its collection images. It also gives conditions that do not fit this site's 1024-pixel, 144-dpi display standard. The web images on the child records are provided for looking at the museum, not as an open production library. This page therefore offers thirty direct links and no copied scroll thumbnails. Its typographic opening graphic represents the thirty-item structure, not a simulated or altered Jakuchū painting. The absence of copied pictures is explained because attribution and rights are part of an honest object guide.

Readers who want to study the pictures should open the exact museum child pages. The index retains the source identifier beside every title so one fish or rooster is not silently replaced by a later imitation or a different impression. Museum records also preserve their own updates; the group record ^[2] was last updated in 2026. A source-linked index can be revised against that authority when the catalogue changes. If individual images are later licensed or supplied under suitable terms, each can be paired with its exact record without rebuilding the entire interpretation.

Where the series sits in Jakuchū's career

The thirty scrolls occupied an intense stretch of Jakuchū's middle years, but his practice did not begin or end with them. The Met's White Plum Blossoms and Moon, 2015.300.213 ^[19], is dated 1755, before the earliest dated Colorful Realm scroll. The set contains Small Birds in Plum Blossoms, -002 ^[7], dated 1758 by the holding museum, and Plum Blossoms and Bright Moon, -008 ^[20], catalogued by 1761. These are separate works with distinct physical homes. The recurrence of plum and moon motifs is a worthwhile comparison, but one should not call the 1755 Met painting a discarded study for a later series scroll without documentary or technical evidence. Repetition can show a painter returning to a problem, not a proven chain of preparatory sketches.

Birds give a similar test after the set. The Met's Hen and Rooster with Grapevine, 1975.268.69 ^[21] is a 1792 painting, about a quarter-century after the completion of Colorful Realm. The series itself includes several roosters, such as Sunflower and Rooster, -005 ^[12] and Group of Roosters, -020 ^[22]. Their common subject should encourage comparison of medium, date, surrounding plant and intended setting; it should not lead a site to insert the open Met photograph as if it pictured one of the museum's thirty scrolls. This is why the series index carries exact child-object URLs even though the artist home already has a strong eight-object gallery.

The artist also made ink works and a printed handscroll while the series was underway or shortly afterwards. The Met's Bean Vine ^[23], from the late 1750s to before 1764, is ink on paper with a monk's inscription. Its Pleasant Diversions on a Riverboat Journey ^[24], about 1767, is a woodblock-printed sequence with Daiten's poems. These objects prevent a misleading story in which Jakuchū simply developed one colour-on-silk style for ten years and then changed technique. Different materials and social settings overlapped. What makes Colorful Realm distinct is its scale as a coherent gift to Shōkokuji, not the claim that no other work was made nearby in time.

How museums have remade the viewing experience

As the set moved from temple to imperial collection and then to state museum, its display became episodic. The holding museum's exhibition list ^[2] distinguishes events where all thirty were shown from those presenting selected works. A selection might foreground a particular subject, colour or anniversary, while a full installation lets viewers feel the sheer accumulation of living forms. Neither format is identical to an eighteenth-century rite at Shōkokuji. A current exhibition can help visitors see relationships, but the curatorial arrangement is another historical layer rather than a transparent reconstruction of Jakuchū's first installation.

The 2012 National Gallery of Art exhibition ^[4] was particularly important because it brought all thirty to the United States after conservation and set them beside the Śākyamuni triptych again. The museum describes the loan as a one-month event. The Shōzōkan record ^[2] lists a later 2018 presentation at the Petit Palais in Paris. These exhibitions increased international access to the group without changing its object identities or the holding institution. A photograph made for one exhibition can differ in lighting, colour management and rights from a museum's own record of the same physical scroll.

Conservation has also changed what scholarship can ask. During treatment, researchers could inspect backs of some silk scrolls and analyse sampled colour passages with portable equipment, as Hayakawa's report ^[5] explains. That access did not make the paintings fully transparent: the method has detection limits, and the sampled points are a fraction of the painted surfaces. The best account joins historical documents, visible form and measured materials. It leaves room for later research to revise a pigment identification or an individual date without collapsing the secure fact that these thirty scrolls were given as a group.

How to look across the set

Start with two pairs rather than trying to memorise thirty titles. Compare the different birds and plants in Sunflower and Rooster / 向日葵雄鶏図, -005 ^[12] and Hydrangeas and Two Roosters / 紫陽花双鶏図, -006 ^[13]. Both have museum labels of 1759, yet the relationship between bird mass and plant growth need not be the same. Then compare the fish in -027 and -028. Their titles suggest a closely related subject, while the pigment study shows that even blue passages can be made differently. The viewer's question shifts from “what animal is this?” to “how has this living form been placed and painted on silk?”

Next, follow the paintings beyond their immediate motifs. Ask how a scroll would relate to neighbouring scrolls and to the Śākyamuni triptych in a temple room. Ask why a peony-and-butterfly image could acquire a poetic title from Daiten. Ask what changes when a work is taken down, conserved, measured and displayed as one National Treasure among other museum objects. None of these questions requires pretending that the online order recreates the eighteenth-century hanging arrangement. They show why a set needs an article about its historical use, material evidence and cataloguing, alongside direct access to the individual pictures.

References

1. Agency for Cultural Affairs, National Treasure record for Dōshoku sai-e. Thirty titles and dimensions; production and donation sequence; custody and designation.
2. Museum of the Imperial Collections, Dōshoku sai-e group record. Thirty child records, attached documents, ceremonial use and exhibition history.
3. Museum of the Imperial Collections, collection-image use policy. Application and electronic-use conditions.
4. National Gallery of Art, Colorful Realm exhibition, 2012. Triptych reunion, ritual setting, conservation and selected technique.
5. Hayakawa Yasuhiro, The Colouring Materials of Itō Jakuchū's Dōshoku sai-e, Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties. Republished 2013 XRF report; 919 points and named colour comparisons.
6. Shōzōkan, Peonies and Butterflies, SZK002949-001. Individual title, date label and dimensions.
7. Shōzōkan, Small Birds in Plum Blossoms, SZK002949-002. Individual title, date label and dimensions.
8. Shōzōkan, White Rooster under an Old Pine, SZK002949-011. Comparison object for red-sun analysis.
9. Shōzōkan, White Phoenix under an Old Pine, SZK002949-025. Comparison object for red-sun analysis.
10. Shōzōkan, Various Fish, SZK002949-027. Museum record for late fish scroll.
11. Shōzōkan, Group of Fish, SZK002949-028. Museum record for late fish scroll.
12. Shōzōkan, Sunflower and Rooster, SZK002949-005. Museum record for 1759 subject comparison.
13. Shōzōkan, Hydrangeas and Two Roosters, SZK002949-006. Museum record for 1759 subject comparison.
14. Parrot beneath an Old Pine , -012
15. Fish Swimming in a Lotus Pond , -017
16. Chrysanthemums and Running Water , -029
17. Insects beside a Pond , -023
18. Shells , -024
19. Met's White Plum Blossoms and Moon , 2015.300.213
20. Plum Blossoms and Bright Moon , -008
21. Hen and Rooster with Grapevine , 1975.268.69
22. Group of Roosters , -020
23. Met's Bean Vine
24. Pleasant Diversions on a Riverboat Journey