Tosiwang, Ninth King of Hell. After mid-1400s. Ink and color on silk. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John B. Bunker. 1982.104.
In 1982 the Denver Art Museum was gifted with the impressive Buddhist painting, the Ninth King of Hell. The painted hanging scroll depicts Dushi-Wang, (都市王 also known as Tosi-Wang in Korean and Toshi-Ō in Japanese)—a king and judge who presides over one of the many Buddhist hells. Seated on his throne, he watches with interest as members of his retinue impale a man on a raised platform. Gruesome as the scene is, the DAM's painting is not unusual for its time. In fact, it is just one painting from a larger group of ten known as the Ten Kings of Hell.
Ten Kings of Hell paintings have been produced throughout China, Korea, and Japan for centuries. Combining visual elements of Tang Chinese (618–907) bureaucracy with Buddhist karmic ideology, these ten-painting sets depict different kings reigning over various hells and dealing out karmic justice; cautioning that those who commit evil deeds in this life will be punished accordingly in hell in the next.
The DAM’s King of Hell is the ninth painting from an important set now dispersed among museums worldwide. The set was first published by Mizuno Keizaburo in the Japanese art journal Kokka in 1961. While Mizuno never disclosed the set’s owner, Harry Packard (1914–1991), a major collector living in Japan at the time, has long been identified as its earliest confirmed owner, selling and loaning the set’s paintings directly to museums as early as the 1960s.
After 1961 the set was broken apart and dispersed. In 1993’s Orientations, Kay Black (1928–2020), an independent Korean art scholar and Denver Art Museum research consultant at the time, was one of the first to attribute the set to Packard’s collection. In her article, she identified the known locations of each painting, noting three were at the Honolulu Museum of Art, one each was at the DAM and Harvard Art Museum, and four were sold through Christie’s in 1992 to a private collector (today, one of these is at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the other three are at the National Museum of Korea). While photographs in Kokka clearly show ten different paintings, Black could only account for nine, acknowledging “the collection in which the painting of the third king currently belongs is unknown to this author.” Later publications all either acknowledged the painting’s unknown location, or omitted the painting, its whereabouts, and missing status entirely. And so, the painting remained missing, and the set was incomplete. Until now.
In Kokka, Mizuno noted each painting bore the same stamp for an unidentified temple called Kitayama (or Kitasan) Hōshō-in (喜多山寶生院), and after searching for this temple in Japan’s National Diet Library database, I finally found a major lead. The database identified a similar King of Hell painting in a 1998 catalog for the Kohō-an Inoue Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, and after viewing the catalog and searching the museum’s online database, I could finally confirm it was, indeed, the missing painting. The painting, which was donated to The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, in 1974 by businessman Inoue Fusaichiro (1898–1993), carries the same temple stamp found on the other nine paintings, while the king and series number also correspond to what would be missing from the traditional set of ten. Moreover, even the online database image appears to be a perfect match to the photo published in Kokka in 1961, finally identifying and confirming the whereabouts of the set’s missing painting.
Despite this exciting discovery, research is still ongoing to answer some of the many questions surrounding the set’s origins and history. For decades, scholars have disputed the set’s proposed thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Korean attribution, while its inconsistencies (including Mizuno’s proposal it was made by two different artists) and its provenance to the still unlocated Hōshō-in temple only add to the mystery.
Nevertheless, new information is being uncovered daily. Digitized databases and publications are essential tools provenance researchers use to cross-reference and confirm information, and resources like the National Diet Library database, the 1998 Kohō-an Inoue Collection catalog, and Gunma’s online collections site were all crucial to locating the missing painting. Hopefully, by locating this final painting and by utilizing these and other resources, we will finally be able to piece together the mysterious origins and history of the former Packard Ten Kings of Hell set.
