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拍品專文
Kano Sanraku was the leading painter of the Kyoto branch of the Kano school. Even during his lifetime he was considered the best of the Kano artists. He is known for his quiet and graceful style, with harmoniously echoing curves and loving attention to small and precisely drawn details of nature.
Rice planting and cultivation is a traditional East Asian subject favored by Kano-school painters and by the shogunal government. Images of abundant harvests produced by hard-working subjects implied secure conditions provided by the ruler.
These scrolls were in the collection of Muto Sanji (1867-1934), a highly respected Osaka businessman and president of Kanebo, as well as a politician and newspaper owner. A portion of his collection, including these scrolls, was sold at auction in Osaka in 1923. The scrolls are identified in the auction catalogue as having come from Kenninji, one of the earliest and most important Zen temples in Kyoto. The Muto sale included two more lots of four scrolls each, identical in size, from Kenninji. One set featured Mongol hunters, the other Zen subjects. There are fourteen subtemples within the Kenninji compound.
Originally made for sliding doors (fusuma), the four paintings were part of a larger composition of farming in the four seasons. For a sixteenth-century pair of screens of this subject by a Kano-school artist, see Melanie Trede, ed., with Julia Meech, Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection, exh. cat. (Berlin: Museum of East Asian Art, National Museums of Berlin, 2006), no. 16. The artist follows a narrative from planting to storage of the harvested grain. In the paintings shown here, we are in a flooded rice paddy in early spring on the right. Men transplant rice seedlings while a worker plows with the aid of a water buffalo. A woman and child bring food. On the far left, the scene shifts to a winter landscape with a bare willow tree. A gate leads to a cluster of houses with thatched roof.
The monochrome setting and theme evoke China. As early as 1483, Kano Masanobu painted scenes of farming for the shogun's villa in Kyoto. There is a set of eight fusuma of agricultural scenes in the four seasons by Kano Yukinobu (c. 1513-c. 1575) in the Reception Chamber in one of the subtemples of Daitokuji, another early Zen monastery in Kyoto. As Matthew McKelway noted, "such deceptively placid farming scenes may have conveyed to their warrior-class viewers the ideal of the prosperous, well-ordered society into which they aspired to transform their chaotic realm" (McKelway in Trede, ed., Arts of Japan, p. 75).
Rice planting and cultivation is a traditional East Asian subject favored by Kano-school painters and by the shogunal government. Images of abundant harvests produced by hard-working subjects implied secure conditions provided by the ruler.
These scrolls were in the collection of Muto Sanji (1867-1934), a highly respected Osaka businessman and president of Kanebo, as well as a politician and newspaper owner. A portion of his collection, including these scrolls, was sold at auction in Osaka in 1923. The scrolls are identified in the auction catalogue as having come from Kenninji, one of the earliest and most important Zen temples in Kyoto. The Muto sale included two more lots of four scrolls each, identical in size, from Kenninji. One set featured Mongol hunters, the other Zen subjects. There are fourteen subtemples within the Kenninji compound.
Originally made for sliding doors (fusuma), the four paintings were part of a larger composition of farming in the four seasons. For a sixteenth-century pair of screens of this subject by a Kano-school artist, see Melanie Trede, ed., with Julia Meech, Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection, exh. cat. (Berlin: Museum of East Asian Art, National Museums of Berlin, 2006), no. 16. The artist follows a narrative from planting to storage of the harvested grain. In the paintings shown here, we are in a flooded rice paddy in early spring on the right. Men transplant rice seedlings while a worker plows with the aid of a water buffalo. A woman and child bring food. On the far left, the scene shifts to a winter landscape with a bare willow tree. A gate leads to a cluster of houses with thatched roof.
The monochrome setting and theme evoke China. As early as 1483, Kano Masanobu painted scenes of farming for the shogun's villa in Kyoto. There is a set of eight fusuma of agricultural scenes in the four seasons by Kano Yukinobu (c. 1513-c. 1575) in the Reception Chamber in one of the subtemples of Daitokuji, another early Zen monastery in Kyoto. As Matthew McKelway noted, "such deceptively placid farming scenes may have conveyed to their warrior-class viewers the ideal of the prosperous, well-ordered society into which they aspired to transform their chaotic realm" (McKelway in Trede, ed., Arts of Japan, p. 75).