Itō Jakuchū’s playful and charming painting shows the legendary seventh-century Chinese figures Kanzan and Jittoku (or Hanshan and Shide, in Chinese) at rest, something strongly associated with the pair, who lived in the wilderness and did not work. The painter emphasizes their idle natures by including the disused broom, whose bristles are rendered as a single dark brushstroke. Jakuchū uses this same tech­nique for their hair, suggesting the unkempt pates of the two figures, beloved in the Zen pantheon, who lived together peacefully as itinerant hermits, unconcerned with material gain or conspicuous religious virtue.

—Bradley Bailey