Landscapes of the Four Seasons,

1640s

1640s

Asia, Japan

In this elegant pair of screens, Tan’yū composed a minimalist landscape of the four seasons (from right to left: spring, summer, autumn, and winter). The landmasses were placed on the outer side of the screens, leaving the center large void space and creating a sense of spatial recession. For the right-side screen, Tan’yū retained a small corner of the mountain supporting a temple at the lower right corner. The autumn moon is depicted in the middle of the rightmost panel of the left screen (hardly visible in the photograph). Snow-laden mountains on the left of the left screen represent a wintery scene. Tan’yū brushed a thin layer of gold speckles to render mists, which suggest an atmosphere of fog and glowing light that penetrates through. Most of the pictorial elements are abbreviated to the extreme, and save for controlled touches of dark ink spots suggesting vegetation.

Tan’yū’s monumental works are mostly on sliding door panels and murals, designed to decorate palatial buildings such as the Nijō Castle, but he produced a surprisingly small number of folding screens representing landscapes in ink monochrome. In terms of style, this pair of screens, signed “Kano Hōgen Tan’yūsai Fujiwara Morinobu hitsu” (Painted by Kano, [with the title of] Eye of the Law, Tan’yū studio, [named] Fujiwara Morinobu) and bearing the seal “Morinobu,” closely resemble a pair of ink landscape screens in the Tokyo National Museum (TNM). The TNM screens are signed with the same names and rank, and written in a similar calligraphic style. Tan’yū was granted the title of Eye of the Law in 1638, and Seal of the Law, the highest rank, in 1662, so the present pair can be dated to sometime between these two dates, around the mid-seventeenth century.