Put a wig on a monkey and it stops being an animal. It becomes a person in disguise, which is exactly what painters wanted from it. Behind that disguise they could mock a habit or a whole profession without naming anyone, and more than one of them turned the joke against the person holding the brush.
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How These Were Chosen
The monkey owes this role to one trait: it copies human gestures without understanding them. Hand it a glass or a brush and everyone recognizes the human habit on show, while the painter can claim he was only painting an animal.
In China and Japan the animal served other ends. Painters used the gibbon for Buddhist lessons about illusion, and for puns built on the sound of its name.
Each of the twelve works puts a monkey or an ape at the center of the picture, not in a corner of a larger scene. Several aim the joke at the art world itself. They run from the twelfth century to the twenty-first, and from the least known to the most famous.
12. Itō Jakuchū, Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon (about 1770)
Two gibbons hang from a single tendril that drops out of a tree, the mother holding her baby by the arm while both stretch down toward the water. The Kyoto painter Itō Jakuchū brushed them in ink around 1770, in a country where no gibbons lived. Japanese painters knew the animal only from pictures brought over from China.
What the pair is reaching for is not in the picture. The title names it: the moon, or rather its reflection in the water below. The subject comes from a Buddhist parable in which monkeys try to pull the moon out of the water, and Zen teachers used it for anyone who takes appearances for the real thing.
Jakuchū painted the scroll in the years when he withdrew again and again to Sekihōji, a Zen temple south of Kyoto, and turned more and more to Zen subjects in plain ink. He gave both gibbons faces as round as the full moon, so that the thing they cannot reach is echoed in the creatures reaching for it.
At a Glance
Artist: Itō Jakuchū (1716 to 1800), Japanese
Painted: About 1770
Medium: Hanging scroll, ink on paper
Size: 114.9 × 48.4 cm (45.25 × 19.06 in)
Where to see it: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (Piano Pavilion, North Gallery)
11. Unidentified Chinese Artist, Gibbons Raiding an Egret's Nest (late 12th century)
A mother egret circles overhead in alarm while three gibbons raid her nest and carry off her young. An unidentified Chinese artist of the Southern Song dynasty, which ruled southern China from 1127 to 1279, painted the scene on silk in the late twelfth century. Yet the raid was painted on a fan, the kind of object one gave as a present, and a scene of stolen chicks seems an odd thing to offer anyone.