Lot Essay
These screens are among Zeshin's most distinguished ambitious paintings. The theme is that of four accomplishments (calligraphy, music, painting and go, a game resembling chess) traditionally the prerequisite abilities and greatest pleasures of a Chinese scholar. The subject and composition were inspired by an early masterpiece of Japanese genre painting, the so-called Hikone screen of ca. 1630, a single six-panel screen in color on gold leaf in the Ii collection, Shiga prefecture. The Hikone screen, which is a National Treasure, depicts modish young men and women indulging in conventional pleasures, but with an enigmatic overtone of pathos and languor. Bodies are twisted to make elegant, overlapping shapes, and costumes are a riot of dazzling color, but there is little real communication or interaction among the self-absorbed participants.
Increasing the number of figures, Zeshin expands the theme to cover two screens. Several figures, notably the young dandy leaning on his sword, are taken directly from the seventeenth century model. The languid, fluid poses are even more accentuated here. Zeshin borrows from the Hikone model the device of a screen within a screen, a simple but effective way of demarkating interior space. He makes the interior setting more explicit (and displays his appreciation of Western spatial recesssion) by adding rugs, a table, a bookcase, and a second folding screen.
Zeshin painted several versions of this subject, although none are as complex and richly structured as the present example. There is a smaller pair of screens, also on gold leaf ground, formerly in the Asada collection and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Baekeland/Young, Imperial Japan: The Art of the Meiji Era (1868-1912), Ithaca, N.Y. 1980, no. 48, pp. 98-99). Another pair of screens on plain paper formerly in the Fujiyama Raita collection is illustrated in Goke, Shibata Zeshin meihin-shu, pls. 221-222, and offered in these rooms on April 22, 1987, lot 418, and in Goke, Shibata Zeshin ten (Tokyo: Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 1980), color plate 33 and fig. 33. A similar pair of screens with fewer figures once in the collection of the sculptor Ishikawa Komei (1852-1913) is illustrated in Kokka 97. There is also a small two-panel screen depicting a detail of the same subject.
Increasing the number of figures, Zeshin expands the theme to cover two screens. Several figures, notably the young dandy leaning on his sword, are taken directly from the seventeenth century model. The languid, fluid poses are even more accentuated here. Zeshin borrows from the Hikone model the device of a screen within a screen, a simple but effective way of demarkating interior space. He makes the interior setting more explicit (and displays his appreciation of Western spatial recesssion) by adding rugs, a table, a bookcase, and a second folding screen.
Zeshin painted several versions of this subject, although none are as complex and richly structured as the present example. There is a smaller pair of screens, also on gold leaf ground, formerly in the Asada collection and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Baekeland/Young, Imperial Japan: The Art of the Meiji Era (1868-1912), Ithaca, N.Y. 1980, no. 48, pp. 98-99). Another pair of screens on plain paper formerly in the Fujiyama Raita collection is illustrated in Goke, Shibata Zeshin meihin-shu, pls. 221-222, and offered in these rooms on April 22, 1987, lot 418, and in Goke, Shibata Zeshin ten (Tokyo: Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan, 1980), color plate 33 and fig. 33. A similar pair of screens with fewer figures once in the collection of the sculptor Ishikawa Komei (1852-1913) is illustrated in Kokka 97. There is also a small two-panel screen depicting a detail of the same subject.