National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties
of National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan

Between the ages of 82 and 83, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) painted this series of 219 works comprising 165 paintings of lion-dogs and 54 paintings of people, such as lion dancers. Hokusai had painted them every morning as a prayer for a long life free of misfortune.

The work comes with two documents written by Miyamoto Chū, describing how he and his father, Shinsuke, had come into its possession. Shinsuke was a retainer of the Matsushiro Domain in Shinshū (present-day Nagano) who had received the paintings from Hokusai, while Chū mounted the paintings as seen today. According to these descriptions, Hokusai frequently visited the town of Obuse, Shinano (another name for Shinshū) during that period. There, he painted ceiling panels for festival stalls and the Iwamatsuin Temple. During one of his visits, Shinsuke had asked Hokusai to produce a hanging scroll. Hokusai promised that he would paint the scroll and send it out before returning to Edo, but never got around to it.

Shinsuke was later stationed in Edo as a kanjō-gata, an accounting position at the Matsushiro Domain’s Edo residence. While in Edo, he constantly searched for Hokusai’s residence. Because Hokusai moved frequently, however, it took Shinsuke three years before he finally located the artist in Asakusa-tamachi and paid him a visit in 1847. Hokusai had not made Shinsuke the scroll he had ordered, instead gifting him over two hundred works that now make up the Daily Sketches at the advice of his daughter, Oei, who had been keeping them for him. In addition, he appended three more works to the drawings: the preface, a painting of the Chintamani Stone, and “The Medicine for Longevity.” These paintings thus entered the Miyamoto family collection. During the Meiji era, each sheet was mounted separately onto boards by Chū.

In this series, Hokusai employed long, fluid brushstrokes to depict the everchanging forms of the lion-dogs and lion dances. Similar works exist in the form of 10 drawings and 1 scroll in the Hokusai Museum collection in Obuse, Nagano, as well as a few other paintings. At 219 sheets, however, this series serves as an important reference due to its quality, volume, and well-documented provenance.