Page 145 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

Blossoming trees could just as easily be included in the category
of flowers, the next and final thematic section of this volume, but artists of the
Rinpa school gave such careful attention to arboreal subjects that these works merit

special attention. A fascination for trees, flowers, and medicinal plants of all varieties,
both on an aesthetic level and in the natural sciences, began to flourish in Japan
just as the Rinpa aesthetic was beginning to evolve. By the early sixteenth

century, woodblock-printed books on botanical subjects published in China were
being carried back to Japan in great numbers by monks, merchants, and officials
of the military government, sometimes by direct command of the shogun. At
the same time, there was a resurgence in the commissioning of grand gardens
by emperors, abbots, and wealthy samurai, an appreciation that is reflected in the

connoisseurship of plants in the paintings of the era.
The artists of the Sōtatsu workshop painted countless screens of trees and
grasses, a genre that became their stock-in-trade. By the late seventeenth century,

other artists working in the Sōtatsu mode were paying even greater attention to
trees of all varieties. A fascinating but hard to categorize set of screens titled Spring
TREES and Autumn Trees and Grasses by a Stream (cat. 60) serves as a bridge between the

archaic Sōtatsu style, as seen in the pines, and that of Sōtatsu’s successors, manifest

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