This painting depicts the Buddha, who passed away on the fifteenth day of the second lunar month on a moonlight night. The painting makes use of bright colours, making it one of the representative works from the Kamakura period. The Buddha, who is positioned in the middle of the work, has his head resting on his right hand. His followers are sitting around him holding out flowers in offering as they mourn his passing. They are accompanied by many different types of animals. His death bed is surrounded by eight sal trees. The tops of these trees extend up into the clouds, where his mother, Queen Maya, has rushed over to see him.

When you look over to the animals, you might find that some of them have been painted in a highly unrealistic way. For example, although the crows, chickens, frogs, turtles, mandarin ducks, and cranes are easy to recognise, animals like the leopard, tiger, and peafowl look quite deformed. This difference seems to have come about due to how the latter animals are not native to Japan, so the artist would have had to use his imagination to portray them. Look at the centre bottom section of the painting, which contains a white coloured elephant on its back, limbs facing upwards like a dog. Doesn’t it look strange? We can tell that the artist must have tried using existing animals in Japan as a model for these exotic creatures. The artist has also chosen to include several fantastical creatures, such as the kirin (a blue coloured lion), the kalavinka (a bird with a long tail and a man’s face), a phoenix, and the mizusai (a hippo-like rhinoceros). Having such a wide range of real and imaginary animal companions brings a sense of liveliness to this painting.

It may be interesting to note that all the animals in this painting are holding different offerings to the Buddha. For example, the crane holds a branch of a pine tree in its mouth; the frog holds a Chinese arrowhead plant; the mizusai offers a conch shell. They are not simply random choices! For example, the motif of a crane alongside a pine tree is commonly found in Japanese art, and is popular for its association with longevity and good luck. The frog and the mizusai are animals that live in or around bodies of water, so they are also associated with objects relating to aquatic environments. It is clear that the artist put in a lot of thought into how each animal was portrayed in this painting.

This is a bed cover that has been covered completely with embroidery. Although there are numerous examples of fabrics and festival floats within Japan that are decorated with images of the Buddha, this bed cover was originally manufactured in China for export to Europe. Kyushu National Museum’s collection of Chinese objects focuses Ming dynasty (sixteenth to seventeeth century) and Qing dynasty (nineteenth century) objects. This bed cover falls into the Qing dynasty portion of the collection.

We can see that this bed cover has been divided into sections, and embroidered richly and extensively with patterns of flowers, birds, and beasts. Let’s look at the playful animals in the centre of the bed cover. A pair of phoenixes are batting their wings around a peony flower, which is positioned in the centre of the design. They are framed by 4 Chinese lions, whose foreheads contain the Chinese character王, meaning, “king”, as they play with temari balls attached to long, colourful strings. On the outer border, starting from the left and going clockwise, we can see the following animals: the kirin (mythical hooved animal with the body of a deer, face of a dragon, and tail of a cow), a tiger, a dog, a horse, the xiezhi (a mythical goat-like creature), a deer, a goat, and an elephant. These eight animals are kept company by various birds, such as chickens and Lady Amherst’s pheasants, colourful flowers, butterflies, and dragonflies.
Pay attention to the thin area between the inner square and the outer square – there are nine rabbits and small birds embroidered into this area! Interestingly enough, while most of the rabbits are white, there is one brown rabbit somewhere in there. I wonder why this was the case?

As you may have noticed, these animals have fairly deformed features and may be hard to recognise at first. However, the feathers of the birds, such as the chickens and pheasants, seem to have been embroidered with exceptional attention to detail, causing them to seem very realistic. This points towards the craftsman’s skill and dexterity.