A Summer Night Beneath the Moon: Kusumi Morikage’s ‘Cooling Off (納涼図)’

A family rests beneath a gourd trellis on a warm night, seemingly unaware of the full moon above. Kusumi Morikage’s seventeenth-century painting Cooling Off appears simple, yet its quiet expressions invite difficult questions about everyday life. Why would a samurai commission such a scene? Discover how domestic imagery, compassion and the responsibilities of power meet in Japanese painting.