Page 131 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

as depicted by the painter. The poem turns the storm-tossed grebe into a meta-
phor for the turbulent life of a courtier or perhaps even the emperor himself —
sometimes seen and honored, sometimes invisible and neglected — in a society

controlled by the brute military power of the shogunate.
Another representative work in this mode shows a duck soaring over a cluster
of irises (cat. 50). Both the bird and the flowers are painted in one of Sōtatsu’s

trademark styles: a monochrome ink painting employing the tarashikomi (“dripping
in”) technique. Here the duck is so stylized and aerodynamically streamlined that
it seems as if the artist wanted to eliminate anything superfluous, even its webbed
feet. Artists of subsequent generations, including Ogata Kōrin and his successors,
made paintings of ducks a Rinpa standard, and they appear in such famous

drawing manuals as One Hundred Paintings by Kōrin (Kōrin hyakuzu) (cat. 51).
The radical formalization and abbreviation of the birds and other animals in
some Rinpa works has raised the question of whether Rinpa artists studied directly

from nature. Although it would have been difficult for any artist in premodern
Japan not to have been influenced by the flora and fauna surrounding them —
even those living in the urban centers of Kyoto and Edo would have enjoyed
immediate access to formal gardens and pristine nature on the outskirts of the
city — evidence suggests that Rinpa artists also looked to works by past masters

for inspiration. We know, for example, that Kōrin immersed himself in the study
of painters of various schools, Sōtatsu first and foremost. The Metropolitan
Museum’s Cranes, Pines, and Bamboo (cat. 52) is a rare surviving preparatory paint-

ing from the beginning of Kōrin’s career showing how he assimilated earlier
models of bird-and-flower motifs at a precocious age. A century later, Sakai
Hōitsu’s pupil Suzuki Kiitsu revisited the same auspicious motifs in his painting of
a red-crowned crane (tancho) winging its way over an aged pine as the glowing
sun of the New Year rises in the distance (cat. 53).

In the East Asian tradition cranes are associated with longevity, as indicated
by the Japanese saying “Cranes live a thousand years, tortoises ten thousand.” They
also frequently serve as companions of Daoist immortals, especially Jurōjin and

Fukurokuju, who in Japan are counted among the Seven Gods of Good Fortune.
As a rule cranes appear in winter poems, since in Japan flocks of cranes arrive in
late autumn and stay through the winter. The birds then depart for the north
come spring, and thus cranes taking flight also frequently appear in springtime
birds

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