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Lot Essay
Against a luminous ground of gold clouds, white egrets are huddled on a gnarled old willow, its bare branches entwined with red-tinged ivy. Ducks swim in a pond edged with browned sedge and reeds. Tree, rocks and distant hills are dusted with snow.
These three two-panel folding screens of waterfowl and egrets in winter were once part of a continuous panorama of birds in a landscape painted on sliding doors (fusuma) surrounding a large audience hall. Traces of original oval door pulls are visible at the edge of each painting. The doors were installed in Akashi Castle in southern Hyogo Prefecture, on the Inland Sea west of Kobe. The castle was built around 1618 or 1619 by Ogasawara Tadazane (1596-1667), founder of the Kokura clan and a maternal grandson of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616). In 1628, fire swept through the castle, but twelve of the sliding doors were among the treasures rescued from the disaster. They were subsequently remounted in pairs as two-panel folding screens. The six pairs came on the market in Tokyo in the spring of 1959, sold by the Tokyo art dealer Yabumoto Soshiro (1914-1987). (For Yabumoto, see Leighton R. Longhi, "Yabumoto Soshiro: The Way of an Art Dealer," Impressions 32 [2011]: 65-81; www.japaneseartsoc.org). One screen went to a European collector and two to an American collector, both of whom were then living in Tokyo. Those three pairs comprise the works being offered here: they were reunited in 1996 when all three were sold at Sotheby's, New York to one collector. The three remaining pairs, featuring pheasants and an egret, flanked the paintings on offer here. Yabumoto entrusted them to his friend and collaborator, the American dealer Harry C. Nail Jr. (1909-1990), based in Atherton, California. Nail sold them to the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in 1962 (figs. 1-3). Mizuo Hiroshi published an article about the set of paintings in the August 1960 issue of the journal Kokka. The remaining images, which probably included spring, summer and fall are now lost; plum blossoms of early spring protrude into the far left screen of the Freer group. The branch of a pine tree is visible at the far right.
Akashi Castle was demolished in 1874, leaving only two turrets and the wall connecting them; the ruins still stand near Akashi Station.
According to a document attached to the back of one of the Freer paintings, the panels were painted for Akashi Castle by Hasegawa Tonin with assistance from his son, Tojun. The document was written in 1883 by Hirai Atsumaro (1835-1906), who remembered seeing the paintings as a youth, when they were mounted as a pair of six-panel screens. When he next saw the paintings they had reappeared as twelve hanging scrolls, and he commissioned their reformatting as six two-panel screens.
Unfortunately, little else is known about the artists, Tonin and Tojun. The Hasegawa school was founded in the sixteenth century by the formidable Hasegawa Tohaku (1539-1610), and these screens are precious evidence of the evolution of the school, which flourished in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, centered in Kyoto. Tohaku worked in a subdued, monochromatic ink style (famously the Pine Trees in the Tokyo National Museum) and but also in a gorgeous color and gold style, as here.
These three two-panel folding screens of waterfowl and egrets in winter were once part of a continuous panorama of birds in a landscape painted on sliding doors (fusuma) surrounding a large audience hall. Traces of original oval door pulls are visible at the edge of each painting. The doors were installed in Akashi Castle in southern Hyogo Prefecture, on the Inland Sea west of Kobe. The castle was built around 1618 or 1619 by Ogasawara Tadazane (1596-1667), founder of the Kokura clan and a maternal grandson of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616). In 1628, fire swept through the castle, but twelve of the sliding doors were among the treasures rescued from the disaster. They were subsequently remounted in pairs as two-panel folding screens. The six pairs came on the market in Tokyo in the spring of 1959, sold by the Tokyo art dealer Yabumoto Soshiro (1914-1987). (For Yabumoto, see Leighton R. Longhi, "Yabumoto Soshiro: The Way of an Art Dealer," Impressions 32 [2011]: 65-81; www.japaneseartsoc.org). One screen went to a European collector and two to an American collector, both of whom were then living in Tokyo. Those three pairs comprise the works being offered here: they were reunited in 1996 when all three were sold at Sotheby's, New York to one collector. The three remaining pairs, featuring pheasants and an egret, flanked the paintings on offer here. Yabumoto entrusted them to his friend and collaborator, the American dealer Harry C. Nail Jr. (1909-1990), based in Atherton, California. Nail sold them to the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in 1962 (figs. 1-3). Mizuo Hiroshi published an article about the set of paintings in the August 1960 issue of the journal Kokka. The remaining images, which probably included spring, summer and fall are now lost; plum blossoms of early spring protrude into the far left screen of the Freer group. The branch of a pine tree is visible at the far right.
Akashi Castle was demolished in 1874, leaving only two turrets and the wall connecting them; the ruins still stand near Akashi Station.
According to a document attached to the back of one of the Freer paintings, the panels were painted for Akashi Castle by Hasegawa Tonin with assistance from his son, Tojun. The document was written in 1883 by Hirai Atsumaro (1835-1906), who remembered seeing the paintings as a youth, when they were mounted as a pair of six-panel screens. When he next saw the paintings they had reappeared as twelve hanging scrolls, and he commissioned their reformatting as six two-panel screens.
Unfortunately, little else is known about the artists, Tonin and Tojun. The Hasegawa school was founded in the sixteenth century by the formidable Hasegawa Tohaku (1539-1610), and these screens are precious evidence of the evolution of the school, which flourished in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, centered in Kyoto. Tohaku worked in a subdued, monochromatic ink style (famously the Pine Trees in the Tokyo National Museum) and but also in a gorgeous color and gold style, as here.