Page 164 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

established Shiko as a precursor to the painting-from-life school (shaseiga) of Kyoto, which developed
under the direction of Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795) at the end of the eighteenth century. The narrative
activities within the village seem to bear only a passing relationship to the Confucian theme of rice
growing; they instead give the impression that Shikô visited the village, observed and drew life there,
and composed what he saw into an artwork. Kimura Shigekazu speculates that Shikô must have gone
from his home in Kyoto to nearby farms and sketched over the course of a year to gather material for
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these screens. While maintaining the naturalistic, atmospheric, and almost momentary appearance
of the scene, Shikô managed to fit in both the rice-growing tasks of the four seasons and a variety of
seasonal genre elements, such as the New Year's daikagura music and dance performance seen in the
large farmyard in the right screen. 163

Having trained first in the Kano school, Shiko knew the officially sanctioned methods of
Kanga-style one-corner composition, which called for building a landscape from both ends of a screen.
Hard black outlines and texture strokes based on calligraphic technique were at the core of Kano
training. After studying with a Kano-school artist, Shiko purportedly became a follower of Ogata Kôrin
(1658 -1716), the great master of the Rinpa school. Shikô probably rendered his Rice Cultivation in the
Four Seasons near the end of his career, after he had absorbed and synthesized his training in both
Kano techniques and Rinpa manners.
Shikô had made a thorough study of the farm worker theme in a group of paintings that in-
cludes the two-panel screen Farmers and Ox on a Path (cat. 93). This fall scene of harvesters walking
home along grass-lined paths, bringing freshly cut bamboo, shows the hot and humid atmosphere of
early fall. The man with the ox is dressed in a summer ramie kimono open to his belly. He walks in a
desultory manner, letting his animal lead the way while he passes the time with a friend. The overall
green and gold tonality of the picture, punctuated only by the rich, wet, inky color of the ox, gives a
soft, warm impression reflective of the season. Mists of gold flecks and tufts of ground cover rendered
with a puddled-ink technique (tarashikomi) enhance the dreamlike effect of this nearly monotone
rendering. The realistic approach of Shikô's late painting of rice cultivation stands in clear distinction
to the purely aesthetic quality of this earlier Rinpa-style scene. In this painting the laborers lose
any didactic or illustrative function that they might have in a genre picture, becoming instead signifiers
of time, place, and ambiance. By serving as atmosphere-enhancing details, these farmers recall
the original function of worker figures in early Yamatoe-style pictures of famous places, seasons, and
ceremonial events of the months.

Shikô had already painted the scene of farmers with an ox on one of a pair of six-panel
screens executed in the same style as Farmers and Ox on a Path. The selection and enlargement of a
single vignette, as seen in Shikô's two-panel screen (and Morikage's Enjoying the Evening Cool under an
Arbor), reflect advances in painting composition made during the Momoyama period. Artists of that
time selected single or small groups of motifs — for instance, an amazing tree, a pair of mythological
beasts, or a group of stylish townspeople or nobles — and set them against an abstracted, decora-
tive background. The device of plucking and enlarging a motif from earlier works or from themes with
multiple figures became a mainstay in art of the Edo period, occurring often in pictures of workers.
Some of the most evocative images are of fishing, a theme with complex reverberations. A Muromachi-
period Beach and Pine (hamamatsu) screen (see fig. i) may have served as a source for images of men
pulling boats seen on a lacquer tray (cat. 94) and on a variety of ceramics and works in other media.