Page 166 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

Going beyond the screen's depiction of strenuous work, the distorted poses of the men on the tray
enter the realm of pure dynamism. The mushroomlike pine trees seem to pursue the men across the
top edge of the tray, their presence possibly reminding us that the source of the design is a Beach
and Pine landscape.
Ogata Kôrin, one of the premier artists of the Edo period, created a curious image of a cormor-
ant fisherman (cat. 96). Korin's fisherman wears a court cap, whereas contemporaneous paintings
of cormorant fishermen do not show such dress. The figure could be a quote from an earlier painting or
courtly literature. Paintings of cormorants and fishing boats by Yamamoto Soken (active 1683? -1796),
Korin's early teacher, and by Ogata Kenzan (1663 -1743), Korin's younger brother, done in the same

cat. 93 style but without the figure, illustrate a poem by the courtier and poetic immortal Fujiwara no Teika 165
Watanabe Shikô,
Farmers and Ox on a Path, (1162 -1241): "As swiftly as the flares disappear,/Upstream in the river where the cormorants fish,/On
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two-panel screen; this short summer night,/This month of parched weather, too,/Will soon be gone." The bounding
ink, color, and gold on paper,
166.2 x 176.6 waves and the curving line that defines the boat, as well as the forward-leaning pose of the fisherman
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(65 /8x69V 2 ), and the diagonal structure of the composition, create a heightened visual tension, hinting that this
Tokyo National Museum
painting might come from a dramatic source. The later Rinpa artist Sakai Hóitsu (1761 -1828) added a
poem at the upper left, which describes cormorant fishing on the Oi river, near Arashiyama in Kyoto.
As there is no particular signifier of Arashiyama in the painting, Hóitsu might have been influenced by
the fishing subject alone when he selected the poem.
Okamoto Toyohiko (1773 -1845) indirectly indicated the presence of boatmen in Moored Boats
(cat. 95), an homage to a painting by his teacher Goshun (1752 -1811). In a manner quite distinct from
Korin's expressionistic painting, Toyohiko followed the lessons of the naturalistic Maruyama-Shijô
school of painters when he created the illusion of a three-dimensional setting and fully realized sea-
sonal environments for his boats. The weighty, volumetric forms of the ships are revealed beyond the
pine tree in the winter scene, and shrouded by the mist in the autumn view. In the former a cover of
heavy snow is seen beyond pines in a rocky cove; in the latter reeds sprout through low waves in warm
misty moonlight. Toyohiko evokes the sounds of waves lapping and rigging slapping against the ships'
masts. The artist followed an old Japanese aesthetic principle of partial disclosure, which holds that

an object is more beautiful, elicits greater wonder, and challenges the imagination further if it is only
partly revealed, like the moon glimpsed through clouds. Though Toyohiko excelled at showing volume
and mass — and couched the objects in romantic terms by partly enshrouding them — he is treating
a theme that was explored repeatedly from the Momoyama period to his own time.
Kaihó Yúshó (1533 -1615) investigated the related theme of drying fishing nets in a pair of
folding screens (fig. 6). Using the graphic shapes of the nets, Yúshó reminded his viewers of the prox-
imity of the fishermen; he also arranged the nets as purely decorative forms. The fisherman's net motif
became a favorite design on clothing (see cat. 60), lacquerware, and ceramics — especially Kokutani
ware. Compared with the purely decorative treatment of these implements of labor, Toyohiko's vision is
more objective. His realistic view, though not playfully decorative and elegant like Yüshó's, enters the
realm of the lyrical.
Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-1799) selected as a topic from the famous places and famous things
genre (meisho meibutsu) the women of Ohara, whose descendants still bring firewood from a town north
of Kyoto into the old capital (cat. 97). In the manner developed in Momoyama genre painting and fully
exploited by ukiyoe artists during the Edo period (see John Carpenter's essay), Rosetsu, a student of