Merciful Mother Kannon (1888) by Kano Hògai (1828-1888) is today one of the most familiar paintings in modern Japanese art history, known both for its status as an early example of nihonga, or modern Japanese-style painting, and for the debates surrounding its production and iconography.1 The painting, which depicts the bodhisattva Kannon (Sanskrit: Avalokitesvara) with an infant inside a spherical form, has provoked numerous inquiries into its sources and subject matter.2 Is Hògai's Kannon-and-child image an original, or does it follow Buddhist precedents? Much of what we know about the painting has been excavated in the process of addressing this question, yet as the scholar Chiba Rei has recently suggested, the many attempts to establish or undermine the painting's iconographic distinctness reveal basic uncertainties about how we understand it today and how it might have been meaningful to its earliest audiences.'' Looking at it anew, we find that Merciful Mother Kannon distills these issues of intelligibility through its composition and in the historical circumstances of its reception: produced to address both Japanese and Western audiences, it anticipates the different backgrounds and requirements of its viewers. First published in the Japanese art journal Kokka (Flowers of the Nation) a year after its creation.
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