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Lot Essay
Mount Fuji, synonymous with Japan itself, looms majestically on the left screen above low foothills, and slightly off center. Below, a quiet village nestles in a valley dense with foliage and obscured by thick mist. Austere in its enormous scale and stark geometry, lacking in any vegetation, the iconic peak is perpetually snowcapped. Tan’yu leaves the ghostly white form in reserve, as white paper, silhouetting its tripartite crown and long downward slope against an inky, gray sky.
Tan’yu appropriated the famous volcano, the highest peak in the country, as his signature subject—his muse—and made it an emblem of Kano identity. There are at least twenty-seven paintings of Fuji by Tan’yu from the 1660s. As the patriarch of the Edo branch of the Kano family and the chief official painter to the military government in Edo (now Tokyo), his atelier was located immediately outside the shogun’s castle. No artist was more influential in his day. His conservative style, drawing on both Chinese and Japanese traditions, was perpetuated for generations.
Fuji became a sacred pilgimage site. During Tan’yu’s lifetime, by the late seventeenth century, the cult of Fuji was proliferating, fed by a succession of religious zealots. The Fuji cult gave rise to the construction of hundreds of miniature Mount Fujis, artificial mounds in and around the city of Edo, many of them still extant today.
Tan’yu paired Fuji with a view on the right screen of Miho Pine Forest (Miho no Matsubara), a long, fingerlike sandbar, dotted with umbrella pines, that juts in from the right edge. This peninsula extends into Suruga Bay, some fifteen kilometers southwest of Fuji. Although the right and left scenes are in reality not contiguous, they are presented as though they were one continuous view—a single, monumental composition.
The Miho sandbar is associated with the Noh play Hagoromo (The feather mantle). A heavenly maiden came down to bathe in the waters of this sandy beach, leaving her magical feathered cloak hanging on the branch of a pine tree. A fisherman stole the mantle and refused to return it until she danced for him. Tan’yu has added allusions to a familiar classical Chinese theme, the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang: on the left side of the right screen are descending geese, and, to the right, a sailboat returning home at dusk. Tan’yu anchors the right foreground with a fishing village. Fishermen reach the shore, and return home by way of a narrow bridge, heading for a fenced enclosure and a flagpole signaling a restaurant.
On Tan’yu and his portraits of Mount Fuji, see Yukio Lippit, Paintings of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in 17th-Century Japan (Seattle and London: The University of Washington Press, 2012), Chapter 2; also Felice Fischer and Kyoko Kinoshita, eds., with Yukio Lippit, contributor, Ink and Gold: Art of the Kano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). On the Fuji cult during the Edo period, see Melinda Takeuchi, “Making Mountains: Mini-Fujis, Edo Popular Religion, and Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” Impressions 24 (2002): 24–45 (www.japaneseartsoc.org).
Robert H. Ellsworth acquired this pair of screens in the late 1960s. He displayed the paintings on the walls of his bedroom.
Tan’yu appropriated the famous volcano, the highest peak in the country, as his signature subject—his muse—and made it an emblem of Kano identity. There are at least twenty-seven paintings of Fuji by Tan’yu from the 1660s. As the patriarch of the Edo branch of the Kano family and the chief official painter to the military government in Edo (now Tokyo), his atelier was located immediately outside the shogun’s castle. No artist was more influential in his day. His conservative style, drawing on both Chinese and Japanese traditions, was perpetuated for generations.
Fuji became a sacred pilgimage site. During Tan’yu’s lifetime, by the late seventeenth century, the cult of Fuji was proliferating, fed by a succession of religious zealots. The Fuji cult gave rise to the construction of hundreds of miniature Mount Fujis, artificial mounds in and around the city of Edo, many of them still extant today.
Tan’yu paired Fuji with a view on the right screen of Miho Pine Forest (Miho no Matsubara), a long, fingerlike sandbar, dotted with umbrella pines, that juts in from the right edge. This peninsula extends into Suruga Bay, some fifteen kilometers southwest of Fuji. Although the right and left scenes are in reality not contiguous, they are presented as though they were one continuous view—a single, monumental composition.
The Miho sandbar is associated with the Noh play Hagoromo (The feather mantle). A heavenly maiden came down to bathe in the waters of this sandy beach, leaving her magical feathered cloak hanging on the branch of a pine tree. A fisherman stole the mantle and refused to return it until she danced for him. Tan’yu has added allusions to a familiar classical Chinese theme, the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang: on the left side of the right screen are descending geese, and, to the right, a sailboat returning home at dusk. Tan’yu anchors the right foreground with a fishing village. Fishermen reach the shore, and return home by way of a narrow bridge, heading for a fenced enclosure and a flagpole signaling a restaurant.
On Tan’yu and his portraits of Mount Fuji, see Yukio Lippit, Paintings of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in 17th-Century Japan (Seattle and London: The University of Washington Press, 2012), Chapter 2; also Felice Fischer and Kyoko Kinoshita, eds., with Yukio Lippit, contributor, Ink and Gold: Art of the Kano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). On the Fuji cult during the Edo period, see Melinda Takeuchi, “Making Mountains: Mini-Fujis, Edo Popular Religion, and Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” Impressions 24 (2002): 24–45 (www.japaneseartsoc.org).
Robert H. Ellsworth acquired this pair of screens in the late 1960s. He displayed the paintings on the walls of his bedroom.