Page 168 - JAPAN THE SHAPING OFDAIMYO CULTURE 1185-1868

mid-fifteenth-early sixteenth century), a
painter-monk of Kenchôji. Shôkei had
studied with Geiami (1431-1485) in Kyoto
between 1478 and 1480 and transmitted his
style to Kamakura. From Kamakura the
style spread in the eastern provinces
through the works of the artists around
Shókei, including Senka, whose Sno\v
Peak Study, also shown here (cat. 91) is
roughly contemporary with Kagenaga's
work. The light blue, clearly outlined
forms of the distant precipices, the short,
angular brushwork defining the jagged
cliff, and the densely textured rock sur-
faces of the tall peaks are some of the com-
mon stylistic features also seen in the
works of Shókei's followers such as Keison
and Kóboku. This style was instrumental
in shaping one of the modes of landscape
painting by Sesson Shükei (c. 1504-^ 1589),
who worked in the northern and eastern
regions of Japan during the second half of
the sixteenth century.
The Nagao in Ashikaga were a branch
of the main family based at Shirai in
neighboring Kôzuke Province, and served
the powerful Uesugi, the deputy shogun
in the East (Kantd kanrei), who was based
at Kamakura. In addition to political and
military interests, similar cultural interests
bound the Nagao in Ashikaga and the
Uesugi. Throughout the fifteenth century,
the Uesugi, especially Norizane (1410-
1466) and Noritada (1433-1454), supported
the Ashikaga Gakkô or Ashikaga School,
one of the earliest formal Confucian
schools in Japan, by donating sinological
books. Some of these evidently had been
pilfered from the Kanesawa Bunko, or
Kanesawa Library established by Hôjô
Sanetoki (1224-1276) in Yokohama. By the
mid-sixteenth century the school was de-
scribed by the Jesuit missionary Francis
Xavier in his letters to the headquarters in
Goa and Rome as "the university in east-
ern Japan/'
The Nagao in Ashikaga also had an ar-
tistic connection with the Kano family,
also of Shimotsuke. The father of Kano
Masanobu (1434-1530), the founder of the
Kano school of painting in Kyoto, had
married a woman from the Ashikaga Na-
gao family. Both the father and the son
therefore had been retainers of the Nagao
clan. In addition, a seventeenth-century
account of Nagao Kagenaga written by a
Kano school painter, Shóun (1637-1702) re-
ports that Masanobu's son Motonobu
(1476-1559) had once studied painting un-
der Kagenaga. The Kano connection with
the Nagao family can also be illustrated by
the fact that Kagenaga's son Norinaga
(1503-1550), a painter in his own right, do-
nated a landscape painting by Masanobu
to the Chôrinji temple in Ashikaga. Ma-
sanobu's painting, executed in a style not
unlike Geiami's, is still extant. Chôrinji, a
Zen temple of the Sotó school, was the
Nagao family's mortuary temple in Ashi-
95

155