Armour shop

Craftsmen were increasingly important in the expanding urban centers of sixteenth-century Japan. The artisans whose products are sold in the fancy shops along the streets of Kyoto in Scenes In and Around the Capital (lot 123) are seen here in their workshops. With assistants that often include the entire family, they ply their trades surrounded by tools of their professions. This type of genre painting, known as shokunin zukushi ("all the professions") was favored by Momoyama patrons; sets comprising twenty-four small paintings were mounted two per panel on a pair of six-panel folding screens. They are the work of anonymous town painters. For a similar set painted by Kano Yoshinobu now in the Kita-in in Saitama Prefecture, see Takeda Tsuneo, Kinsei shoki fuzokuga (Early modern genre painting), Nihon no bijutsu 20 (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1967), fig. 82.