Page 103 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

maples. The two unmanned skiffs tossed by the waves add a certain ominous, som-
ber aura to an otherwise colorful autumnal seascape. One unusual variation on the
wave theme incorporates designs of painted fans floating on roiling seas (cat. 32).

The supreme statement of angry or menacing waves is Ogata Kōrin’s two-panel
screen Rough Waves (cat. 34), in which we sense both the primordial energy of the
sea and the force of Kōrin’s artistic personality. The screen is sealed with the art

name “Dōsū,” which Kōrin adopted in 1704, and most scholars now believe that
Rough Waves was created sometime between 1704 and 1709, when the artist was
living in Edo. The image of a boatman in a courtier’s cap and loose-fitting robes
poling a raft or small boat on waves was among the pictorial motifs that Kōrin
helped make famous, and renditions in various formats by both him and his fol-

lowers survive (cat. 35). The source of the imagery is unclear. One theory holds that
it derives from earlier illustrations of the “Sumida River” (Sumidagawa) episode of
The Ise Stories, which is set on the waterway that separates Musashi and Shimōsa

provinces (both part of present-day Tokyo). According to the tale, the courtier-
protagonist is being ferried with his companions in a small boat when he is told
that the birds he sees are “capital birds” (miyakodori), reminding him of the lover
he left behind in Kyoto, the imperial capital. In the early twentieth century,
the textile designer and illustrator Furuya Kōrin, who styled himself as a “Kōrin

of the modern age,” created inventive designs for kimonos that drew on themes
from the Rinpa repertoire, among them wave imagery and his own rendition of
the iconic boatman poling a skiff (cat. 36).

Suzuki Kiitsu drew on the vigor of Kōrin’s stylized wave patterns but soft-
ened the overall effect in a subtly printed and embossed surimono (privately pub-
lished woodblock print) commissioned by a circle of haiku poets to memorialize a
deceased mentor (cat. 37). Sakai Ōho, who like Kiitsu trained under Sakai Hōitsu,
was by no means a prolific artist, but he mastered the Rinpa idiom, and his works

are noted for their exaggerated use of tarashikomi (“dripping in”) to achieve a
mottled color ation. Among Ōho’s surviving paintings are diminutive handscrolls
just a couple of inches in height, including a superb composition on the theme of

the Six Jewel Rivers (Mu-Tamagawa), inspired by ancient poems about six rivers,
all named Tamagawa, that exist in different locales (cat. 38).
Even the great lacquer artist Shibata Zeshin, who worked in the Meiji period
(1868 – 1912), could not resist borrowing a design of stylized waves for an inrō (small
waves

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