Carbide & Carbon Building • Chicago, Illinois Almost done editing my 5 bajillion pictures of Chicago, and had to make several more out of this one. I’m fairly certain there isn’t a square inch of the exterior of this building that I’m not madly, passionately in love with.
Its #BatAppreciationDay so please appreciate this awesome 19th century Japanese kosode decorated with embroidered lucky bats, photographed in 2019 at The Life of Animals in Japanese Art exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in DC:
Kosode with Bats
Japan, Edo - Meiji periods, 19th century
silk twill, paste-resist dyed, embroidery, 67⅜ × 48⅞ in.
National Museum of Japanese History, Chiba Prefecture
“In the West, bats - nocturnal in habit and denizens of dark places tend to be viewed as unlucky, but in China they have long been considered an auspicious motif (one of the characters used to write the word "bat" is a homonym for good fortune). The Kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjüro VII (1791-1859) used bat motifs in his costumes, and the perception of these animals as a chic design element spread rapidly throughout Japan in the nineteenth century. Here a great number of them are arranged in right-left symmetry from the base of the collar to the hem.”
The above info is from the official exhibition catalog - this bat kosode is on p. 124: