Page 106 - Bonhams, The H Collection, Classical Chinese Furniture, May 13, 2021 London

25
ANONYMOUS
Sunset over Musashi Plain, Momoyama (1573-1615)
or Edo (1615-1868) Period, 17th century
A six-panel folding screen painted in ink, mineral
pigments, and gold on paper applied with gold leaf,
depicting a red sun setting over Musashino (Musashi
Plain), with autumn plants including susuki (pampas
grass), ominaeshi (valerian), hagi (bush clover), kiku
(chrysanthemum), and kikyo (Chinese bellflower) above
a band of gold mist; unsigned.
Each panel 170.3cm (67in) high x 64cm (25 1/8in) wide.

£60,000 - 80,000
CNY540,000 - 720,000

日本桃山或江戶時代，十七世紀 武藏平原日落 紙本設
色 金箔地六折屏風

Provenance:
Butterfield & Butterfield, San Francisco, 18 June 1991,
lot 2110 (front cover)
An important European private collection

來源：
舊金山Butterfield & Butterfield拍賣行，1991年6月18
日，拍品編號2110（封面拍品）
歐洲重要私人收藏

For a related example, see a seventeenth-century
two-panel screen of Musashino at Sunset, Peggy and
Richard M. Danziger Collection; see Rosina Buckland,
Golden Fantasies: Japanese Screens from New York
Collections, exh.cat., New York, Asia Society, 2004,
cat.no.14 (image accessible at http://sites.asiasociety.
org/arts/japanesescreens/scr08.html)

Some seven centuries before this screen was painted,
Musashi Plain to the west and north of Edo (present-
day Tokyo) had already entered the Japanese artistic
imagination as a wild, distant, and featureless place. An
episode from the tenth-century Ise monogatari (The Ise
Stories), for example, tells how the exiled courtier hero
and his lover hide in its grasses before being flushed
out by the threat of a fire set by the Governor’s men.

Screens depicting Musashino with nothing but grasses
and the moon—rather than the sun—first appeared
in the later Muromachi Period (133-1573), before the
move of a substantial part of Japan’s elite population
to the growing metropolis of Edo made the plain an
actual rather than an imaginary location. In response to
this increased awareness, painters in different traditions
took up the challenge of depicting the eerie yet
beautiful wilderness, sometime adding a wider range of
canonical autumn plants or rarely and dramatically, as
here and in the example cited above, even replacing the
moon with the sun.

For details of the charges payable in addition to the final Hammer Price of each Lot
104 | BONHAMS please refer to paragraphs 7 & 8 of the Notice to Bidders at the back of the catalogue.