A Light Coloured Ink Painting on Paper Depicting the Playful

Rōgyokusen-zu: The Immortal Whose Flute Called a Phoenix

On a hanging scroll a little over a meter tall, a woman raises a bamboo flute to her lips, and a phoenix answers from the sky. The painting is titled Rōgyokusen-zu, "The Immortal Rōgyoku," and it came from the brush of Iwasa Matabei Katsumochi (1578–1650), an artist remembered today as one of the originators of ukiyo-e. Ink carries almost the entire image. Color is reduced to the faintest tints, and a thin breath of gold pigment lies over the whole sheet, so the figures seem to rise out of a half-remembered dream rather than stand plainly before the eye.

The story behind the scene comes from ancient China. Rōgyoku, Nongyu in Chinese, was a daughter of Duke Mu of Qin during the Spring and Autumn period. She studied the flute under an immortal named Shōshi (Xiao Shi), who could imitate the cry of the phoenix so closely that the birds themselves came down to listen. In time Rōgyoku learned the trick of it, and when she played, phoenixes gathered around her. She married Shōshi, and the tale ends with the two of them rising into the sky and vanishing, he on a dragon and she on a phoenix. Matabei catches the single instant when the music has done its work and the first bird is already in the air.

The work belongs to the collection of the Tekisuiken Memorial Cultural Foundation in Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture, and is kept at the Chiba City Museum of Art. Japan designated it an Important Cultural Property on 10 July 2009.

One Panel of a Scattered Screen

The painting did not begin life as an independent scroll. It was once part of a folding screen of pasted pictures, the so-called Kanaya screen (旧金谷屏風), said to have descended through the Kanaya family, merchant purveyors who helped finance the Fukui domain. Twelve images made up that screen, each a separate composition mounted side by side, and over the centuries they were taken apart and dispersed. Rōgyokusen-zu is one of the survivors.

Those twelve panels are the cornerstone of how scholars understand Matabei's later years. After the Toyotomi clan fell at Osaka in 1615, the artist left Kyoto and settled in Fukui around 1616, where he stayed for roughly two decades before being summoned to Edo in 1637. The Kanaya pictures date from this Fukui period, and because they can be placed there with some confidence, they serve as a yardstick for attributing other, less certain works to him. To call Rōgyokusen-zu a benchmark of his mature hand is not a flourish; it is literally how the field uses it.

That history is part of why the painting carries the weight it does. It is not only a beautiful object but a fixed point, a securely dated work against which the rest of a famously slippery body of attributions can be measured.

What the Ink Is Doing

Stand close, and the first thing to notice is restraint. Matabei could handle dense color when he wanted to, but here he refuses it. He even narrows his range of ink, holding back the darkest blacks and working mostly in pale, watery gradations. The result is deliberately flattened, dreamlike, with the faint gold wash pulling everything a half-step away from the real world.

Against that softness, one element is allowed to assert itself: the lines of Rōgyoku's robe. Where the rest of the picture is built from gentle tonal washes, her garment is drawn with thick, supple ink lines that swell and taper as they travel. This thickening and thinning of the brushstroke, a hallmark of the Chinese-derived tradition of figure painting, gives her body its presence. The long sleeve that lifts and curls as she plays reads almost as the visible shape of her melody.

A comparison helps. Another surviving Kanaya panel, Kanjo Kangiku-zu ("Court Lady Viewing Chrysanthemums"), also strips away color and works in ink alone, but it leans toward plain outline drawing and sets passages of dark ink (a woman's hair, the body of an ox-cart) against pale skin for contrast. Rōgyokusen-zu takes the opposite path. It avoids those dark accents almost entirely, keeps its tonal range narrow on purpose, and lets the thin gold do the atmospheric work. Where the court-lady picture is crisp, this one is hushed.

Where to Look

The composition is held together by three pairs of eyes. The phoenix above, Rōgyoku at center, and the small attendant girl beside her form a triangle of gazes, and that triangle is the structural spine of the picture. Follow it and the whole arrangement clicks into place.

Rōgyoku's face is the most carefully worked passage in the painting. Even as she plays, her eyes turn upward to meet the phoenix, so that she seems to listen to her own music and watch its effect at the same moment. There is a quiet tension in that doubled attention. The sloping bank of earth at the lower edge, the roots of the paulownia tree, and the branch reaching off to the right at the top all bend inward, as if cupping the figures and catching the resonance of the sound.

One detail rewards a second glance. The phoenix itself is tiny, painted small and faint in pale ink, almost shy. Earlier picture-books of immortals, including the Ming compendium Senbutsu Kishō that Matabei seems to have known, tend to give the bird more weight. He reverses the emphasis, shrinking the phoenix and enlarging Rōgyoku, so that the painting becomes less about the marvel of the descending bird and more about the woman and the sound that summoned it. Your attention is pushed, gently, toward something you cannot see: the music.

The Painter Behind the Brush

Matabei's own life reads like a tale he might have illustrated. He is said to have been born in 1578 to Araki Murashige, a warlord who that very year rose in revolt against Oda Nobunaga. The rebellion collapsed, and most of the Araki family was put to death; the infant, by tradition, was carried to safety by his wet nurse and sheltered at a temple. He grew up under his mother's family name, Iwasa, studied the Tosa and Kanō manners of painting without binding himself to any one school, and made his way as an independent artist in Kyoto.

His Fukui years produced much of what we now think of as his work. Later his reputation reached Edo, and in 1637 the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, called him east to design wedding furnishings for his daughter. Known in his lifetime as "Ukiyo Matabei," he came to be regarded as a forerunner of the floating-world pictures that would define Japanese print culture. He died in Edo in 1650, at seventy-three. Knowing this background, the dreamlike calm of Rōgyokusen-zu reads a little differently: a quiet, inward picture from a man whose beginnings were anything but.

Seeing the Painting and the Area Around It

This is a scroll, not a building, so seeing it depends on timing. Rōgyokusen-zu is part of the Tekisuiken Collection, one of Japan's strongest private holdings of Edo-period painting, and it is housed at the Chiba City Museum of Art. The work is not on permanent view; it appears in special exhibitions, often surrounded by other treasures of the same collection: hand-painted ukiyo-e and the bird-and-flower paintings of artists such as Itō Jakuchū. Before you plan a trip around it, check the museum's current exhibition schedule.

The Chiba City Museum of Art sits in central Chiba, an easy ride east of Tokyo, and it is worth a visit in its own right for its Edo painting and ukiyo-e holdings. The foundation that owns the painting takes its name from the Terashima family of Kashiwa, who served as village headmen in the Edo period; their residence along the old Mito highway became a salon where writers and painters gathered, and that gathering of art and people is the root from which the collection grew. Kashiwa today is a lively commuter city on the line between Tokyo and Tsukuba, convenient to combine with a wider day of looking at art in the Chiba area.