Author: Kōtaku Hosoi
Mid-Edo period (18C) (Donated by the Homma family)
Hosoi Kōtaku (1658-1735) was a calligrapher and Confucian scholar who worked for Yoshiyasu Yanagisawa, a close associate of Tsunayoshi Tokugawa. His talent was recognised by Setsuzan Kitajima, a pioneer of karayō shodō (Tang Dynasty-style calligraphy) in Japan, who taught him the calligraphy of Wen Zhengming (a leading Ming dynasty painter, calligrapher and scholar.) What you see here is his transcription of the prose text ‘Memorial to Yueyang Tower’ by Fan Zhong Yuan (989-1052), a politician and literary figure of the Northern Song Dynasty in China.