The Rakan Handaka Sonja with Dragon

Utagawa Hiroshige

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This woodblock print design by the highly esteemed artist Utagawa Hiroshige shows a dragon magically emanating from the alms bowl of an arhat (disciple of Buddha) depicted in a hanging scroll. It is an extremely rare surviving example of a surimono, or privately published woodblock print, from early in Hiroshige’s career. Surimono like this one were often commissioned by poetry groups or individual poets—from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century—as a form of New Year’s greeting card. This print celebrated spring of the year of the dragon, 1820. To our knowledge, only two other impressions of this print survive, and it is a rarity among rarities from the corpus of the young Hiroshige, still in his early twenties when he created this. The rakan Handaka Sonja (Sanskrit: Arhat Panthaka) is one of the sixteen disciples of Buddha often depicted together. Whether in paintings or netsuke carving he is usually shown accompanied by his pet dragon which he keeps in a bowl (as here) or in a gourd.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art