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Lot Essay
Rinpa means "school of Korin," but the tradition began much earlier with the work of Sotatsu and Koetsu in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Images of deer are closely associated with Rinpa design.
Forms are simplified and abstracted, with a fresh eye for novelty. The pine at the right is disproportionately small, emblematic of the surrounding forest. The alert stag twists back--something has caught his eye. Standing upright at the center of the composition, he contrasts with the placid female resting before him. Sotatsu favored a technique of puddled ink known as tarashikomi to create soft textures. Here, the artist uses tarashikomi effectively to convey spots on the deer and the bark of the tree.
The flattened, rounded silhouettes of these deer recall Sotatsu's famous Deer Scroll now in the Seattle Art Museum and elsewhere, and the frontispiece painting for the National Treasure Heike Nogyo, a set of Lotus Sutra scrolls originally donated to Itsukushima Shrine in the twelfth century.
The screen is accompanied by a letter of attestation by Yasuda Yukihiko, dated May 1959.
For the story of Yabumoto Soshiro, a previous owner of the screens, see Leighton R. Longhi, "Yabumoto Soshiro: The Way of an Art Dealer," Impressions, Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America, 32 (2011): 65-81 (www.japaneseartsoc.org).
Forms are simplified and abstracted, with a fresh eye for novelty. The pine at the right is disproportionately small, emblematic of the surrounding forest. The alert stag twists back--something has caught his eye. Standing upright at the center of the composition, he contrasts with the placid female resting before him. Sotatsu favored a technique of puddled ink known as tarashikomi to create soft textures. Here, the artist uses tarashikomi effectively to convey spots on the deer and the bark of the tree.
The flattened, rounded silhouettes of these deer recall Sotatsu's famous Deer Scroll now in the Seattle Art Museum and elsewhere, and the frontispiece painting for the National Treasure Heike Nogyo, a set of Lotus Sutra scrolls originally donated to Itsukushima Shrine in the twelfth century.
The screen is accompanied by a letter of attestation by Yasuda Yukihiko, dated May 1959.
For the story of Yabumoto Soshiro, a previous owner of the screens, see Leighton R. Longhi, "Yabumoto Soshiro: The Way of an Art Dealer," Impressions, Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America, 32 (2011): 65-81 (www.japaneseartsoc.org).