Page 188 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

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Okamoto Toyohiko (1773 -1845) Ogata Kôrin (1658-1716)
Moored Boats in Winter and Autumn Cormorant Fishing
Pair of six-panel screens; Hanging scroll; ink and
ink and light color on paper light color on paper
5
Each 136 x 276 (5372 x io8 /s) 97.8 x 33.2 (3872 x 13 Vs)
Kyoto National Museum The Seikado Foundation, Tokyo
Important Art Object
• The boats pictured in these screens
by Okamoto Toyohiko were used for • Ogata Kôrin executed this painting
cargo transport between Osaka and with rich wet inks and a casual draw-
ports in northern Japan. Paintings like ing manner indicative of the theme of 187
these may have been commissioned literati réclusion. A single fisherman
by merchants who owned fleets of works at night by light from a basket-
such boats (Miyajima et al. 1985,176). held charcoal fire. He watches intently
The curved, heavy wood construc- for his cormorants to catch fish —
tion and reed-mat covers of the boats which he prevents them from swal-
create ovoid forms broken by the lowing by use of the tethers he holds
empty triangles of the masts and around their necks. All concentration
lines. In the winter screen (right) is directed in a circle that leads from
hills and pines heavily laden with the fisherman's eyes, to the fish in
snow enclose the boats, only partly the cormorant's mouth, around the
revealed, in a frozen cove. In the prow of the boat, and up the fisher-
autumn screen (left) Toyohiko placed man's back. The leftward thrust of
the boats in a complex grouping, with this focus is counterbalanced by the
the more distant ones enveloped in foreground bird, which points toward
mist beyond clumps of reeds. the lower right.
Toyohiko here employed traditional The mysterious detail of a fisherman
seasonal signifiers in the landscape wearing a court hat might indicate
genre as fully realized settings for that this painting illustrates a classic
his theme of moored boats. To render poem. The poem written at the upper
snow he used techniques such as left is by Sakai Hóitsu (1761 -1828),
outside shading (sotoguma), and to a follower of Kórin. It reads: "On the
convey mass and volume he painted Oi River the cormorant fisher's fires/
one edge of a form dark (kataguma) Show by night how swiftly waves
and used texture strokes developed carry the boats down" (translated by
for naturalistic effect by Maruyama Royall Tyler ).HG
Ôkyo, a founder of the Maruyama-
Shijó school. Toyohiko's teacher, Go-
shun (1752 -1811), who founded the
Shijó branch of that school, painted
moored boats on a set of sliding door
panels at Daigóji in Kyoto, but his
picture simply showed four boats
standing in misty moonlit water. To-
yohiko's treatment of the subject —
with its lyrical, evanescent quality,
rich use of ink, naturalistic rendering
of volume and space, and composition 96
with a centered focus — make this
work a precursor to the Kyoto school
of Nihonga (Japanese-style painting)
of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. HG