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Rats and rice bales
Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849)
1843
- Medium
- Ink and color on silk
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- H x W (image): 91.5 × 30 cm (36 × 11 13/16 in)
- Culture
- Japanese
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Asian Art
- Credit line
- Gift of Charles Lang Freer
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Rice bales are traditional emblems of wealth in pictures of the popular god Daikoku, one of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune. Daikoku is not shown, but his association with this symbol of wealth, which he usually protects, may be one of many meanings embedded in this unusual picture. Perhaps it represents the fragility of accumulated wealth or possibly competition for survival among social groups or classes. This image may have expressed such meanings more vividly in the aftermath of the devastating Tenpo famine (1833-36).
