Lot Essay
The screens are accompanied by a letter of attestation from the painter Kano Yasunobu (1613-1685) as follows: Sumi-e enko no byobu isso Sesson shinpitsu utagainaki mononari (Pair of ink-painted screens of monkeys, a certified original painting by Sesson), Kano Hogan Yasunobu [kao] kugatsu nanoka (Kano Hogan Yasunobu [with kao] ninth month seventh day). The screens are also accompanied by another unsigned and undated (though presumably contemporary to the Yasunobu letter) document which evaluates the screens at 300 kan
The last great Muromachi ink painter, Sesson lived in the provinces of north central Japan. He transmitted Chinese styles that had been reworked over the preceding centuries but infused the traditional subjects with a power and originality that are unique in Japanese painting. His activity spans half a century and recent scholarship has documented more than sixty works that can be attributed to Sesson, although few are dated. The work illustrated here is a major new discovery.
In this pair of screens eleven monkeys (including one white baby monkey) cling to trees and boulders beside a waterfall and turbulent river. On the right screen monkeys seem to point down toward a moon rising through the mist beyond the river. Perhaps it is simply a reflection of the moon in the water. Monkeys were painted by Japanese monk-painters as early as the fourteenth century. In an ink painting with an inscription predating 1366, Zen artist Tesshu Tokusai (died 1366) depicted a monkey on a boulder peering intently down into a stream. The theme was taken up by Shikibu Terurada (or Ryukyo), a mid-sixteenth century contemporary of Sesson, in his well-known ink painting "Monkeys on Rocks and Trees", a pair of six-panel screens in the Kyoto National Museum. Shikibu's composition resembles the Sesson screens in its overall structure: a large tree anchors the far right and left corners, a lake and central boulder connect the two screens, and monkeys point to a reflection of the moon in the water. With thirty-four monkeys, however, not to mention a profusion of boulders and foliage, and a rushing mountain stream at the outer corner of each screen, Shikibu's work seems busy and mannered.
The classic prototype for all monkey paintings is "Monkeys", a masterpiece by the late thirteenth-century Chinese Zen painter Mu-ch'i (died 1269-74), now part of a triptych with a White-Robed Kannon and Crane in the collection of Daitoku-ji, a Zen temple in Kyoto. Mu-ch'i was admired by visiting Japanese Zen monks even in his lifetime, and they returned to Japan with his work. A 1365 inventory of artworks in the Engaku-ji, a Zen temple in Kamakura, mentions Mu-ch'i's "Monkey seated in Zen meditation."
Sesson enlivens his work with humor; his playful monkeys lack the ponderous soul-searching intensity of Mu-ch'i, but the moon retains its significance as a symbol of Buddhist enlightenment, and a lone monkey squatting with its eyes closed near the center of the left screen might well be described as a "monkey seated in Zen meditation". Other monkey screens by Sesson are not known, but he used the theme several times in hanging scrolls in Japanese collections which are painted with the same free, wet brushstrokes and sensitivity to ink tonality. (These scrolls are so similar stylistically to the present pair of screens that there can be no doubt about the authorship of the screens.) One single scroll shows a monkey family in a bamboo grove reaching for a crab. A diptych in the Ibaraki Prefectural Museum (formerly in the Sakai collection) shows a pair of monkeys and grape vine on the left, and three monkeys hanging from the branch of a tree over a river on the right. The mother monkey has a white baby monkey on her back and, typically, points down at the water. The water is punctuated with a claw-like wave that turns back on itself. All of these scrolls are signed. They are dated on stylistic grounds to the 1570s, when Sesson settled down to paint at Tamura in Miharu, in the province of Iwaki (modern Fukushima prefecture). (See Kameda Tsutomu, Sesson vol. 25 of Nihon bijutsu kaiga zenshu [Shueisha, 1980],pls.42 and 53; Etoh Shun, Sesson Shukei zengashu [Kodansha, 1982], pls. 130-132).
Several characteristic hallmarks of Sesson's personal style are evident in this pair of screens. His landscapes typically convey no illusion of space. He does not lead the viewer into distance but works instead with compulsive, lateral surface rhythms to create a theatrical, dramatic effect. In this example the rhythm is set up by the contortionist posturing of the monkeys, notably the abrupt angularity of their arms, and is echoed in the tree branches, ground bamboo, and thorny bushes.
Also typical of Sesson are the individualized wave patterns on the right-hand screen. The stylized turbulence of the whitecaps, formed like the claws of an animal, creates a wave type that occurs frequently in his work. One might compare, for example, the waves in his "Dragon and Tiger", a pair of six-panel screens in the Cleveland Art Museum. The movement of water from right to left in the Monkeys screen also resembles the design of the Cleveland screens, as well as the Bird and Flower screens in the Yamato Bunkakan, Nara.
The last great Muromachi ink painter, Sesson lived in the provinces of north central Japan. He transmitted Chinese styles that had been reworked over the preceding centuries but infused the traditional subjects with a power and originality that are unique in Japanese painting. His activity spans half a century and recent scholarship has documented more than sixty works that can be attributed to Sesson, although few are dated. The work illustrated here is a major new discovery.
In this pair of screens eleven monkeys (including one white baby monkey) cling to trees and boulders beside a waterfall and turbulent river. On the right screen monkeys seem to point down toward a moon rising through the mist beyond the river. Perhaps it is simply a reflection of the moon in the water. Monkeys were painted by Japanese monk-painters as early as the fourteenth century. In an ink painting with an inscription predating 1366, Zen artist Tesshu Tokusai (died 1366) depicted a monkey on a boulder peering intently down into a stream. The theme was taken up by Shikibu Terurada (or Ryukyo), a mid-sixteenth century contemporary of Sesson, in his well-known ink painting "Monkeys on Rocks and Trees", a pair of six-panel screens in the Kyoto National Museum. Shikibu's composition resembles the Sesson screens in its overall structure: a large tree anchors the far right and left corners, a lake and central boulder connect the two screens, and monkeys point to a reflection of the moon in the water. With thirty-four monkeys, however, not to mention a profusion of boulders and foliage, and a rushing mountain stream at the outer corner of each screen, Shikibu's work seems busy and mannered.
The classic prototype for all monkey paintings is "Monkeys", a masterpiece by the late thirteenth-century Chinese Zen painter Mu-ch'i (died 1269-74), now part of a triptych with a White-Robed Kannon and Crane in the collection of Daitoku-ji, a Zen temple in Kyoto. Mu-ch'i was admired by visiting Japanese Zen monks even in his lifetime, and they returned to Japan with his work. A 1365 inventory of artworks in the Engaku-ji, a Zen temple in Kamakura, mentions Mu-ch'i's "Monkey seated in Zen meditation."
Sesson enlivens his work with humor; his playful monkeys lack the ponderous soul-searching intensity of Mu-ch'i, but the moon retains its significance as a symbol of Buddhist enlightenment, and a lone monkey squatting with its eyes closed near the center of the left screen might well be described as a "monkey seated in Zen meditation". Other monkey screens by Sesson are not known, but he used the theme several times in hanging scrolls in Japanese collections which are painted with the same free, wet brushstrokes and sensitivity to ink tonality. (These scrolls are so similar stylistically to the present pair of screens that there can be no doubt about the authorship of the screens.) One single scroll shows a monkey family in a bamboo grove reaching for a crab. A diptych in the Ibaraki Prefectural Museum (formerly in the Sakai collection) shows a pair of monkeys and grape vine on the left, and three monkeys hanging from the branch of a tree over a river on the right. The mother monkey has a white baby monkey on her back and, typically, points down at the water. The water is punctuated with a claw-like wave that turns back on itself. All of these scrolls are signed. They are dated on stylistic grounds to the 1570s, when Sesson settled down to paint at Tamura in Miharu, in the province of Iwaki (modern Fukushima prefecture). (See Kameda Tsutomu, Sesson vol. 25 of Nihon bijutsu kaiga zenshu [Shueisha, 1980],pls.42 and 53; Etoh Shun, Sesson Shukei zengashu [Kodansha, 1982], pls. 130-132).
Several characteristic hallmarks of Sesson's personal style are evident in this pair of screens. His landscapes typically convey no illusion of space. He does not lead the viewer into distance but works instead with compulsive, lateral surface rhythms to create a theatrical, dramatic effect. In this example the rhythm is set up by the contortionist posturing of the monkeys, notably the abrupt angularity of their arms, and is echoed in the tree branches, ground bamboo, and thorny bushes.
Also typical of Sesson are the individualized wave patterns on the right-hand screen. The stylized turbulence of the whitecaps, formed like the claws of an animal, creates a wave type that occurs frequently in his work. One might compare, for example, the waves in his "Dragon and Tiger", a pair of six-panel screens in the Cleveland Art Museum. The movement of water from right to left in the Monkeys screen also resembles the design of the Cleveland screens, as well as the Bird and Flower screens in the Yamato Bunkakan, Nara.