Dragon and Clouds

These eight panels were painted in 1763 as sliding doors, almost certainly for the hall of a temple, though nobody knows which one. Across more than ten metres of paper, the dragon's head pushes out of whirling cloud at one end and its scaly tail lashes through mist at the other, all in ink of every density from pale grey to black. The middle of the beast is gone. Four more panels, the ones that carried its coiled body between head and tail, have been lost. The paintings arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1911 already stripped from their doors, mounted in four sections on thick paper, and they stayed in poor condition for almost a century. Around 2006 the museum's conservators began separating and repairing the damaged sheets, and mounted them on new wooden lattice cores close to their original form as doors. The restored dragon was shown first in Japan, as the headline work of the 2012 touring exhibition of the museum's Japanese masterpieces, which opened at the Tokyo National Museum. It went back on view in Boston in 2014.