Edo Period (1600-1868)

At the start of the Edo period, the Kano school painters remained influential, and the impressive bird-and-flower fusuma-e in theTenkyuin subtemple of Myoshinji Temple in Kyoto, painted by Eitoku's pupil Kano Sanraku and Sanraku's adopted son Sansetsu, are outstanding works of that genre. Diverging from the Kano school, the artist Tawaraya Sotatsu (? - 1643?) incorporated into his works more of the traditional techniques seen in the old yamato-e, together with some of the cheerful, optimistic feel for everyday life that characterized the increasingly assertive townspeople. The freshness of Sotatsu's style extended to ink paintings, instilling new life into classical themes, as in his folding screen paintings titled Wind God and Thunder God at the Kenninji Zen monastery in Kyoto.

Also during the early Edo period, depictions of kabuki actors and scenes from Edo's pleasure quarters produced by independent painters from among the common people became increasingly popular. These provided the groundwork for the great popularity which would later be enjoyed by ukiyoe ("floating world pictures") of beautiful women and other subjects related to entertainment and the enjoyment of everyday life.

By around the middle of the Edo period, the Kano school of officially appointed government painters had become completely formulistic and stereotyped, and even Tosa school painters who had tried to preserve yamato-e techniques had nothing new to add to tradition.

In this environment, the activities that most command our attention are those of the painter Ogata Korin (1658-1716) in Kyoto and the early ukiyoe artists, most prominently Hishikawa Moronobu (? - 1694). Korin is stylistically rather close to Sotatsu, but his pair of folding screens titled Red and White Plum Trees showed many fresh and innovative techniques. Moronobu established his own well-known style of "portraits of beautiful women." He was the first to produce woodblock prints that stood as independent works of art, rather than mere book illustrations. Woodblock-printing technology gave an enormous stimulus to ukiyoe, which could now be mass-produced to meet popular demand. After Moronobu's death, ukiyoe became firmly established as an art form among the ordinary citizens of Edo through the activities of such artists as Torii Kiyonobu, Torii Kiyomasu, and Okumura Masanobu.

Throughout the late Edo period, many creative approaches were taken both by individual painters not associated with any school and by those who favored one tradition or another, for example, ukiyoe, bunjinga (literati paintings), Kyoto's Maruyama-Shijo school, which was inspired by the style of the painter Maruyama Okyo, or Western-style painting (yofuga), whose influence was becoming increasingly apparent.

(1) Shinobazu Pond

The artist Odano Naotake (1750-1780) was born the son of a feudal retainer in Kakunodate, in the Akita domain of northwestern Japan. He studied Western painting under the guidance of Hiraga Gennai and, together with Satake Shozan (daimyo of the Akita domain) and Satake Yoshimi, also from Akita, founded the school of Edo-period Western-style painting known as Akita ranga, or Akita school. This work is a representative masterpiece of this genre. The depiction of the potted peony (shakuyaku) in the foreground makes use of Western shading techniques that give it a three-dimensional appearance. The background is drawn with very precise, narrow lines modeled after copper-plate illustrations from Holland. The artist later illustrated the important translation (from Dutch) on anatomy titled Kaitai shinsho, but died at a young age.

(2) Beauty Looking Back

The artist, Hishikawa Moronobu (? - 1694), a painter of the early Edo period, is traditionally said to be the founder of the ukiyoe genre. Born in Awa Province (present-day Chiba Prefecture), he moved to Edo, where he first worked on book illustrations. He perfected his own style of beautiful women portraits drawing on traditional customs and manners paintings from the Kyoto-Osaka region. In this work, he has produced a memorable depiction of a woman who wears an obi sash that was then popular and has been walking somewhere but has stopped to take a look backward. This masterpiece is one of Moronobu's best-known hand-paintings.

(3) Screens Depicting Landscape with Pavilions

This is the work of Ike no Taiga (1723-1776), who, together with Yosa Buson, greatly developed the Japanese "literati painting" (bunjinga) style. This pair of six-fold screens take as their subject matter two famous Chinese pavilions, Yueyanglou (pronounced Gakuyoro in Japanese) on the right-hand screen and Cuiwengting (pronounced Suiotei in Japan) on the left-hand screen, both of which were often mentioned in anecdotes about gatherings of literati (bunjin). The right-hand screen also has a view overlooking Tongting Lake (pronounced Doteiko in Japanese). The subtle way in which the artist has applied various shades of light pigment to a gold-leaf background is a notable feature of this work. With a very dexterous use of the brush, Ike no Taiga has imbued these scenes with much genuine poetic feeling.

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• Scroll Painting(Emaki)
• Screen and Partition Painting(Shoheiga)
• Buddhist Painting(Butsuga)
• Ink Painting(Suibokuga)
• Litearati Painting(Bunjiga)
• History of Painting