2 Landscape
By Watanabe Shiko (1683–1755)
Pair of six-panel folding screens; ink and gold on paper
Each H: 166.8 ; W: 372.0 cm
The Museum Yamato Bunkakan

© Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Label

This pair of screens depicts a mountainous and watery landscape. In the right screen an old scholar and his attendant walk along a path that disappears behind a hill; the path reappears from behind a steep mountain in the left screen. The screens are thus linked both by the land masses and by a narrative element suggested by the winding path.

Watanabe Shiko was the eldest of the eight innovative painters of eighteenth-century Kyoto whose works are featured in this exhibition. At the beginning of his artistic career, he was most likely a “town painter” working in a privately owned shop or atelier. Such painters were expected to master a variety of styles in order to meet the demands of customers. Shiko is said to have been trained in the Kano tradition, that of the school officially recognized by the samurai class, as well as in the Rinpa tradition, whose style epitomized the decorative beauty of painting and crafts in Kyoto.

This pair of screens shows great skill in traditional composition and execution; he organized the scenes tightly and executed them meticulously. The style of these two paintings by Shiko is closely tied to the Kano tradition, which the Kyoto artists who appeared after him in the second half of the eighteenth century found burdensome and restrictive of their individual artistic visions and expressions. As a result, innovative painting in Kyoto began to change significantly.

Catalog Entry - Same text cat. 1&2

Evening descends on two hermitages, tucked away in fishing villages in hidden coves. In the right screen of this pair, a flock of geese descends to clumps of reeds near a moored boat, while gentle winds propel a small sailing craft towards port in the left screen. Although the time of year is difficult to determine in these screens painted by the early eighteenth century master Watanabe Shikô, the geese in the right screen suggest autumn, while the dense foliage in the grove of screens in the left screen might make late summer a reasonable guess. Painted in monochrome ink, forms fade into a surface completely covered in gold leaf, creating a sensation of dense, humid atmosphere.

Although both screens abound with narrative details, such as a woodcutter on a bridge in the right screen, and fishermen in the left, Shikô's theme in this painting is the Chinese ideal of reclusion, and the convivial interruptions that friendly visits can bring. Both screens focus our attention on figures safely at home in waterside huts. Having turned their backs on participation in the public sphere, these men have devoted themselves to self-cultivation, to private lives as simple and pure as that of the fisherman and woodcutter.

By the eighteenth century, gilded folding screens (kinbyôbu) were a long-established form of Japanese painting, having first appeared in extant works and written documents in the Muromachi period (1336-1573). Such extant late medieval "gold screens" present motifs painted in bright mineral pigments on paper, around which abstracted clouds and mist covered with gold leaf were interspersed, requiring a lengthy, meticulous process of cutting the gold leaf so that painted motifs and gold leaf would not overlap.

Another approach to folding screen images involved painting directly on the gold leaf, a process made difficult by the inability of gold leaf to absorb ink and pigments.[Ref. 1] Only from the early seventeenth century, however, did some artists begin fully to realize the expressive possibilities in the technical limitations inherent in applying ink and pigments directly to the absorption-resistant gold surface. Gods of Wind and Thunder, by Tawaraya Sôtatsu (active early 17th c.) combines opaque mineral pigments with smoky clouds of ink pooled on the surfaces of the screens. Masters of the "Kyoto Kano" painting workshop, Kano Sanraku (1559-1635) and Kano Sansetsu (1589-1651), produced some of the earliest examples of gold screens with paintings in ink monochrome. Ink monochrome gilded screens by Sanraku, Sansetsu, and eventually other Kano workshop painters tend to depict Chinese-style landscapes, which may indicate an interest in folding fan paintings on sprinkled gold surfaces, imported from the Suzhou region of China in the seventeenth century. Landscapes in ink on gold had a lasting impact on painters in Kyoto, as attested by the numerous extant works by painters of the Tsurusawa School (a branch of the Edo Kano in Kyoto), as well as others, such as Ishida Yûtei, Watanabe Shikô, Maruyama Ôkyo, Ike no Taiga, Yosa Buson, and Nagasawa Rosetsu [see cat. nos. 6, 9, 33].

Watanabe Shikô produced at least four pairs of landscape screens in ink on gold, two of which are included in the present exhibition. [Ref. 2] In the pair of screens from the Feinberg Collection Shikô counterbalances views of two fishing hamlets, contrasting dense clusters of motifs in the lower right and left corners, respectively, with unpainted areas in the upper left and right corners of the two screens. These corner-weighted compositions in turn create a wide open space in the center, where the two screens meet, in effect creating a broad vista in the resulting void. Although this compositional formula originated in Southern Song Dynasty paintings by such masters as Xia Gui and Ma Yuan, Shikô derived his pictorial structure from the Kano school, which had transformed and perfected Chinese compositions to suit the grand visual fields of folding screens and sliding panels (fusuma). Other elements that Shikô adapts from Kano-workshop painting methods include sudden juxtapositions of heavily saturated ink with light washes, and pronounced contour lines on rocks and trees. In addition, Shikô inherits from the Kano a wide vocubulary of brushwork, including "axe-cut" texture markings to define the sharp, hard forms of boulders such as that in the second panel of the right screen, as well as rapidly dabbed dots to define foliage.

The Feinberg screens support the claims of Shirai Kayô, who in his treatise Gajô yôryaku (Essentials of the Way of Painting, 1831) reports that Shikô "first learned from the Kano, and subsequently turned to [Ogata] Kôrin.[Ref. 3] Kayô goes further, to single out Kano Naonobu (1607-1650) as chief among the influences on Shikô's landscapes, and Kôrin for Shikô's ink paintings of plum blossoms and pines.[Ref. 4] With its ethereal ink washes, abbreviated forms, and highly mannered, painterly approach to the zigzagging tree branches and knobby rock contours, the Feinberg screens demonstrate the impact of the Edo Kano school painting style in Shikô's training.

The ink-on-gold landscape screens in the Yamato Bunkakan (cat. no. 2) afford further insight into the breadth and depth of Shikô's experimentation with different painting styles. If the Feinberg screens look back to Shikô's early training under the influence of the Edo Kano, the Yamato Bunkakan screens look forward, anticipating the breakthroughs achieved by Shikô's younger contemporary, Maruyama Ôkyo (1733-1795), who admired the older painter's work.[Ref. 5] While at first glance the Yamato Bunkakan screens appear to repeat the opposing corner-weighted composition of the Feinberg pair, a closer look at the composition and positioning of Shikô's signatures and seals suggests otherwise. Since Japanese artists tend to place their names on the outer edges of such paired paintings, the Yamato Bunkakan screens thus meet at a rising mountain form at the right and left screens' left and right edges, respectively. In the right screen, an aged scholar and his youthful attendant walk a path that disappears behind a hill outlined in quick gray strokes; the path then reappears from behind a steep mountain in the left screen. The screens are thus linked not only by the physical presence of the mountain mass, but also by a narrative element implied by the winding path.

Starting with the way he structures his painting, Shikô embarks on a wholly new approach in the Yamato Bunkakan screens. Although the painter suggests a low horizon in the Feinberg screens, the Yamato Bunkakan screens utilize a low horizon, foreshortening in the winding stream and huts, and a consistent atmospheric perspective combined with an intuitive, almost western-style perspective that effectively conveys a more logical sense of space than that of the former example. Comparing individual motifs such as pine trees, for example, reveals further differences: the charmingly awkward, meandering branches in the lone pine in the Feinberg screens comes directly out an established Kano-school-based painting manual tradition; on the other hand, the pine in a corresponding position in the Yamato Bunkakan painting has consistent, even contours, shading to suggest volume and mass, and more naturalistic ranks of needles, all of which suggest a more direct engagement with the natural world. To support this, Shikô shades and models rocks and earthen forms with light strokes gray that result in a naturalistically descriptive effect.

The differences in these two screen paintings reveal the work of an artist who constantly sought after fresh, new modes of painting even within the limits of the ink-on-gold landscape idiom. Relatively little of Shikô's biography is known, but his name does appear in the diaries of some of his contemporaries, particularly his principal patron, Konoe Iehiro (Yorakuin, 1667-1736). A scion of Kyoto's highest-ranking courtier family, Iehiro provided Shikô with patronage and opportunities to see treasured paintings for almost twenty years, between 1708 and 1736.[Ref. 6] According to Kaiki, Iehiro's memoirs recorded by Yamashina Dôan, Shikô copied paintings by Kano Tan'yû (1602-1674) and Naonobu for Iehiro's new palace in 1727. Kaiki also happens contains a passage from 1727 in which Iehiro praises Kano Naonobu's "brush ideas," likening them to classical masters of calligraphy. The close correspondence of the Feinberg screens with Naonobu's airily abbreviated style, combined with the sumptuous gold medium, and the screens' finely wrought metal ornaments, strongly suggest that they were painted sometime around 1727. Given their stylistic departure, the Yamato Bunkakan screens, may thus have been completed sometime after 1736, when Shikô's association with Iehiro ended and the artist's death in 1755.

References

1. A screen painting of pine trees, dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth century and attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu (d. ca. 1522), in the Tokyo National Museum may be the earliest extant example of a folding screen image painted directly on a gold leaf surface. See Kano Hiroyuki, "Gaisetsu: Kyôto gaha no ei'i," in Kyoto Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, Kinsei Nihon no kaiga exh. cat., Kyoto National Museum, 1984, p. 9.

2. The others include a pair in a private collection in Japan and another in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The pair in Japan is illustrated in Yamato Bunkakan, ed., Watanabe Shikô: Kyôga no fukkô, exh. cat., The Museum Yamato Bunkakan, cat. 26, pp. 42-43.

3. Shirai Kayô, Gajô yôryaku, quoted in Yamato Bunkakan, ed., Watanabe Shikô, p. 92.

4. Shirai Kayô, Gajô yôryaku, 92.

5. Shirai Kayô, Gajô yôryaku, 92.

6. For example, in 1735 Shikô completed a three-year effort to copy all twenty scrolls of the Miraculous Legends of the Kasuga Deities (Imperial Collection). See Nakabe Yoshitaka, "Watanabe Shikô o megutte," in Yamato Bunkakan, ed., Watanabe Shikô: Kyôga no fukkô, p. 7.