Edo Screen Painting in Context

It has been some time since the Japanese lived among folding screens (byôbu) and sliding doors (fusuma) covered with painting from edge to edge. Few born in the 1980s and after have even touched such byôbu-e and fusuma-e. When I mentioned this to the curator and staff of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston back in the 1990s, they were dumbfounded, particularly those of them familiar with traditional Japanese culture. But the fact is that even living in Japan, one is unlikely to come across screen paintings these days outside the walls of an art museum.

Many people assume that they could see any number of original screen paintings if they visited the temples and other historic buildings of Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital. In fact, though, the temples and shrines originally furnished with such artwork have been replacing them with digital reproductions to protect the originals from damage caused by exposure to varying temperatures and levels of humidity over the course of the year.

How does this situation affect our perception and understanding of the art form? If one seeks to understand the principles under which Japanese art came into being, the key questions one asks when approaching premodern screen paintings are what the patrons and the painters sought from these works, why they were commissioned, and why they were painted. To be sure, by uprooting such works from their intended environment and displaying them together in a white exhibition space, we make it easier to appreciate their formal qualities—composition, line, color, and so forth—since all attention is focused squarely on the exhibited objects. At the same time, it seems to me that unless one is able to imagine these objects in their original settings, one’s understanding of them as paintings is far from complete.

SCREENS IN A SCREEN

Visual records from the past can help us reconstruct, in a historical context, the settings in which these bold and colorful objects were created and viewed, and a good place to start is genre paintings of festivals and similar events painted around the beginning of the Edo period (1603–1868). One example is the Hôkoku Festival screens, of which two versions are extant: one by Kanô Naizen (1570–1616), preserved in Toyokuni Shrine, and one attributed to the workshop of Iwasa Matabei (1578–1650), in the Tokugawa Art Museum. Both are pairs of six-panel screens illustrating a one-time event, held August 12–18, 1604, to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the death of the ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98). In both sets, the right-hand screen depicts the events of August 14: the ceremonial sakaki branch offering, a parade of 200 mounted warriors from various domains, a procession of dengaku dancers, and votive offerings by the Konparu, Kanze, Hôshô, and Kongô schools of nô. The left-hand screen portrays the main event of August 15, performances by two groups of 500 dancers, representing northern and southern Kyoto. While Kanô Naizen’s work is relatively quiet and restrained, Matabei’s emphasizes the swarming movement of the crowds to enhance the impression of a vast spectacle.

Our immediate focus of interest, however, is the byôbu-e that line the spectator stands from which people are watching the various attractions. According to Takeda Tsuneo, who has studied the works closely, most of the byôbu-e depicted in the Naizen version—in which the compositions and styles are easier to discern (figures 1 and 2)—portray subjects typical of yamato-e (traditional Japanese-style painting), and those with a silver background outnumber those coated with gold.* The use of silver no doubt stems in large part from the desire to make the screens stand out from the gold background and gold clouds of the painting in which they are depicted, but the subjects are certainly worthy of note: Willow Bridge and Waterwheel, Musashino Plain, Autumn Grasses, Surf, Wisteria, Ivy, Pine, Willow and Heron, Waves and Gabion, and so forth—all large-scale renderings of seasonal scenery and natural objects, sometimes combined with human artifacts. But what distinguishes these subjects is not so much their yamato-e origins as the way they lend themselves to bold compositional designs. Of course, it could be argued that Naizen might have chosen simple, geometric compositions for these "pictures in a picture" for practical and aesthetic reasons. However, the notion that the painter has accurately represented the kind of paintings that would have been used to provide lively and gay decoration at an urban festival of this nature is substantiated by the similarity of these screens to those that Kyoto households display even today during the Byôbu Festival held concurrently with the Gion Festival, a centuries-old summer tradition.

It has been noted frequently but is nonetheless worth repeating here that there exist even today byôbu-e with a close stylistic resemblance to some of those depicted in Naizen’s Hôkoku Festival screens, and that these screens have traditionally been referred to as Momoyama hyakusô, that is, "the hundred Momoyama sets." According to Ishida Yoshiya’s research, the origins of the term Momoyama hyakusô can be traced to the lectures and writings of Okakura Kakuzô (1862–1913), widely regarded as the founder of Japanese art history as a modern discipline.* In the English-language book The Ideals of the East (1903), in which he attempted to elucidate the aesthetic of East Asian art for Western readers, Okakura writes about these screens as follows:

Now was discovered the wonderful usefulness of gold-leaf, employed so much ever since that day as decoration for walls and screens. Some screens of the celebrated "hundred sets" belonging to the palace-castle are still preserved, as well as some of those which adorned the wayside for miles during the processions of Hideyoshi.^†

As this suggests, the Momoyama hyakusô byôbu-e were used not only inside, to decorate Hideyoshi’s Momoyama palace, but also outside, to line procession routes. In other words, they were used to set the stage for certain outdoor spectacles centered on Hideyoshi, although it is unclear today what sort of ceremonies these were. In any case, it seems fair to say that the byôbu-e Naizen depicts lining the spectator stands in his Hôkoku Festival screens convey the character and aspect of screens used to enliven such spectacles and entertainments.

Although the screens attributed to the workshop of Iwasa Matabei also show byôbu-e lining the spectator stands, stylized gold mists obscure them, allowing us only glimpses, as through a bamboo blind (figure 3). The complex and masterful technique seen here, contrasting with Naizen’s more straightforward approach, typifies the decorative style of works associated with Matabei, who was once regarded as the originator of ukiyo-e painting.

SCREENS IN A HANDSCROLL

This distinctive decorative style is prominently displayed in the Jôruri monogatari handscroll (MOA Museum of Art), one of the representative works of Matabei’s workshop. A rich and gorgeous example of tsukuri-e, in which the surface is almost completely covered with a thick layer of brilliant, opaque pigment, it likewise features representations of byôbu-e and fusuma-e and raises additional questions concerning this genre of painting. Thought to date from the period when Matabei was in the service of the Matsudaira daimyô who ruled the Fukui domain, it is a work that somehow offers the viewer the thrilling sensation of peaking into a secret garden. What is the source of this sensation?

The Jôruri monogatari emaki consists of 12 scrolls telling and illustrating the popular story of Princess Jôruri, the beautiful daughter of a very wealthy family in Mikawa province. More specifically, it concerns the love affair that developed between her and Ushiwakamaru—the young Minamoto no Yoshitsune—when the latter stopped in Mikawa with his retinue on their journey to the East. This popular medieval tale gave its name to a style of narrative—jôruri—later associated with the bunraku puppet theater. The present work, however, appears to have been created not for a general audience but for a specific patron. It is a private work, in other words, and perhaps that is why, as one scrolls through it, one finds oneself gazing in fascination and rapture, as if one were the sole witness of some lavish secret ceremony.

One of the most distinctive features of these scrolls is the way the long process of wooing and winning, unfolding within the princess’s luxurious residence, is reflected in the ever-changing accoutrements of the lavishly decorated rooms. The way the scroll’s richly ornamental painting harmonizes with the texts’ highly detailed description within the context of Japan’s decorative tradition has been pointed out recently by Tsuji Nobuo, who has studied Matabei’s work for many years.* Here, we will look at scene 5 of scroll 3 (figure 4), focusing on the paintings adorning the fusuma, which are symbols for each of Princess Jôruri’s 12 ladies in waiting.

Ushiwakamaru must overcome various hurdles to find his way into Princess Jôruri’s private chambers. After finally gaining admittance to her residence, he sneaks through the maids’ quarters with the assistance of the princess’s trusted waiting woman. Through the rolled-up blinds, we can see the fusuma of the maids’ quarters, each lavishly decorated with paintings of seasonal plants and flowers: a bush warbler in bamboo, a rabbit and the full moon, chrysanthemum and vines, and so forth. Needless to say, these flowers also carry the significance of female beauty, pointing to the "flower" that resides within. Past all these paintings, at the top of a short flight of steps flanked by arched handrails, we see fluttering curtains decorated with a bold banana plant motif. Beyond the curtains lies the princess’s room.

The lavishly painted fusuma not only provide a breathtaking sight in and of themselves but also harmonize beautifully with the cherry trees and pines in the courtyard, as the painter exploits the sympathetic vibration between surrounding trees and the fusuma paintings that are "nested" in the scroll painting. The complexity of the composition recalls earlier works that likewise exploit the design possibilities of pictures within a picture—specifically, an impressive pair of folding screens by Kanô Motonobu (1476–1559), in the Freer Gallery of Art.^†

In the Freer work, 12 small, vertical monochrome ink landscapes in the Chinese style are mounted on the panels of two large six-panel screens, each decorated with flowers, trees, and grasses of the four seasons. The emergence of this sort of design most likely relates to a method of displaying paintings in Japanese-style drawing rooms, or zashiki, that took hold in the Muromachi period (1333–1568). The Muromachi era was the age of byôbu-e par excellence, a time when vast numbers of folding screens were produced by painters of both of the two major schools of painting: kanga, which emulated the idioms and techniques of Chinese academic paintings, and yamato-e, which carried on and developed the native Japanese style cultivated by the imperial court during the Heian period (794–1185). It was as if the two opposing camps were vying with one another in quantity and quality of screen production. Of these, yamato-e screens were often used as decorative display panels over which Chinese monochrome landscape paintings were hung, allowing visitors to enjoy the byôbu-e and hanging scrolls simultaneously. The appearance of the "paintings within paintings" genre in byôbu-e thus reflects the actual manner in which paintings were displayed and viewed in these zashiki.

The byôbu-e Birds and Flowers with Bamboo Blinds in Hikone Castle Museum (figure 5) also reveals a "nested" design, but in this case the inner pictures are bamboo blinds painted with colorful flowers—peony, iris, wisteria, hydrangea, cotton rose, chrysanthemum, yellow hollyhock and ivy, and nandina (nanten) and narcissus—mounted in the center of each of the eight screen panels. They are surrounded by the gold-leaf background of panels, which are decorated in turn with a kind of garden landscape featuring plants and flowers of the four seasons. This generates a kind of decorative synergy with the painted blinds.

A precedent for this byôbu can be found in the two-panel screen Chrysanthemums and Flowing Water by Tawaraya Sôsetsu (Tawaraya Sôtatsu’s successor, active mid-seventeenth century) in the Kyoto National Museum. And a variant of these works is the rather smart two-panel screen of Autumn Grasses and Flowing Water in the Itabashi Art Museum, in which not bamboo blinds but rectangles of a similarly translucent material called takeyamachi are mounted on the panels. By placing rectangles of this material in the center of the panels like a translucent curtain over a window, the artist has revealed an extraordinarily fresh and daring sense of design. The surrounding autumn grasses and stream, painted against a gold ground, appear again to be part of a garden.

DECORATIVE PAINTINGS OF THE FOUR SEASONS

The foregoing suggests that screen painting depicting other paintings occupied a specific niche as a style of decorative byôbu-e, and that the genre may have emerged as an effort to reproduce the method of displaying paintings in zashiki that became popular in the Muromachi period. The Edo-period screens of this genre further distinguish themselves by their original and playful compositions.

We have already seen the central role flowers of the four seasons play in such screens. Indeed, the subject of flowers and grasses figured prominently in the screen painting of the early premodern period. It was treated often by painters of the Kanô school, which represented the orthodox mainstream favored by the Tokugawa shogunate; a fine example is the screen paintings of Morning Glories and Clematis from the Tenkyûin subtemple of Myôshinji, associated with Kanô Sanraku (1559–1635) and his successor Kanô Sansetsu (1589–1651).

The followers of Tawaraya Sôtatsu comprised another representative group of painters involved in the genre of flowers and grasses. We can still see numerous works from this school, distinguished by an aesthetic that continues to resonate even today. One of the more accomplished flower paintings produced by followers of Tawaraya Sôtatsu is the fusuma of Cherry Blossoms and Poppies in the Ryûshi Kinenkan (figure 6). What first catches the eye when one views these sliding doors are the cherry blossoms in full bloom that spread almost symmetrically across the upper portion of the four panels. The flowers are rendered not in the vividly realistic or finely detailed manner often seen in later Edo painting but in a quiet, understated style that makes use of soft colors and the "boneless" method of painting, which dispenses with outline. Applying one of the trademark techniques of this school, the artist has rendered branches, leaves, and stems by spreading a layer of ink to which pigment has been added and then letting drops of verdigris fall on the still-wet area, taking advantage of the pooling of the paint to create a mottled surface that lets the gold background shine through in places. In the lower section, meanwhile, we see an almost botanical approach in the great variety of flowers arrayed, including some plants not ordinarily considered ornamental: red and white poppies, Japanese thistle (no-azami), Japanese violets, bracken (warabi), dandelion, horsetail, strawberry begonia (yukinoshita), Chinese ground orchid (shiran), and so forth.

With paintings of this type, one’s appreciation is deepened by a familiarity with its thematic and formal precursors. The motif of poppies intertwined with various wildflowers and grasses, the use of the boneless method to depict plants, and the compositional approach of displaying branches without the trunk can all be traced to a distinctly peripheral style of plant-and-insect painting traditionally produced in the Piling area of the Jiangnan region in southern China. More specifically, scholars have pointed out striking similarities to two scrolls of Plants and Insects in Manshuin temple in Kyoto, dating to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). In all likelihood the painter of the Cherry Blossoms and Poppies screen copied the plants from the Chinese scrolls, omitting the insects, and then transformed the composition completely by spreading it out over a large format covered with gold leaf. Viewed within the broad framework of East Asian art history, such examples help us understand the process of absorption and transformation by which artists imported appealing styles and then developed them to generate their own idiom.

THE REBIRTH OF CHERRY BLOSSOMS AND POPPIES

The tradition of screen paintings that depict flowers of the four seasons, as developed by the Kanô school on the one hand and the followers of Sôtatsu on the other, passed through the hands of such masters as Ogata Kôrin (1658–1716) and Yamamoto Sôsen (1679–1760) and reached its heyday around the mid-eighteenth century. Such paintings, adapted to the tastes of wealthy city dwellers from the samurai and merchant classes, were used to decorate rooms where guests were received and entertained. By transplanting a garden full of flowers into a building’s interior, such paintings doubtless gave viewers the sensation of having discovered a paradise with four seasons. (The Japanese concept of the paradise, or Pure Land, is by no means incompatible with scenery that changes along with the seasons.)

In the modern period, the Cherry Blossoms and Poppies screen took on a role that cemented this connection. After finding its way into the hands of the Kyoto painter Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883–1945), it was "reborn" as a set of sliding doors for an altar room in the miniature Buddhist temple that Kawabata Ryûshi (1885–1966)—a nihonga artist known for his large-scale works—had built into his private residence in the late 1950s to early 1960s. Figure 7 shows the fusuma opened to reveal a sculpture of the Eleven-headed Kannon (Nara period), which Ryûshi worshipped devoutly, flanked by such Buddhist images as Bishamonten and Fudô Myôô (both Heian period). For Ryûshi, this group of rooms, built to console the spirits of the wife and child he had lost, was a space for sacred decoration. The fusuma-e stand at the boundary between the world of human beings and the sacred space of the Buddhist pantheon. The door pulls built into the fusuma are decorated with the characters for flower, bird, wind, and moon, and are said to be of Ryûshi’s own design. Ryûshi doubtless saw in this painting of flowers and grasses a simple, naive beauty worthy to serve as a shôgon, or sacred adornment, for the Buddha.

Japan’s cultural history raises fascinating issues concerning our relationship with artworks from an earlier age. When, after encountering byôbu-e and fusuma-e in the static environment of a modern museum, we go in search of the original context for which they were painted, we come into contact with a rich variety of festivals and ceremonies, some conducted in the public space of the city, others in the personal space of a private chamber. Screens of this sort were used to make the setting gay and festive and lift the hearts of the participants, or at times simply to add a quiet ornamental beauty. Examined in their original context, such decorative artworks reveal themselves as objects designed to create a vibrant setting in which people came together and forged or reaffirmed social relationships.

Translated from an original article in Japanese written for Japan Echo.

*Takeda Tsuneo, "Hôkoku sairei zu ni miru gachû byôbu-e" (The Screen Paintings Depicted in the Hôkoku Festival Screens), in Nihon byôbu-e shûsei (Compendium of Japanese Folding Screen Paintings) (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1977–80), supplement 8.

*Ishida Yoshiya, "Momoyama hyakusô o megutte" (Regarding the "100 Momoyama Sets"), in Momoyama hyakusô: Kinsei byôbu-e no sekai (The "100 Momoyama Sets": The World of Early-Modern-Period Folding Screens, exhibition catalog) (Tokyo: Suntory Museum of Art, 1997).

^†Okakura Kakuzô, The Ideals of the East (London: John Murray, 1903).

*Tsuji Nobuo, "Kotoba no kazari, e no kazari—Emaki Jôruri no hanpuku hyôgen" (Word Decoration, Picture Decoration: Repetitive Expression in Handscroll Jôruri, paper delivered before the Kazari Kenkyûkai, April 1, 2006).

^†For an intriguing discussion of this type of work, see Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1996).

© 2006 Japan Echo Inc.