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and his workshop made a set of twenty painted sliding-door panels (fusuma-e) for
Yōgen-in, a temple in Kyoto, including four with a continuous depiction of a mas-
sive pine beside a craggy hill. As rendered by Sōtatsu and his followers, clusters

of pine branches became even more rounded and trunks gently contorted, a mode
that would eventually become a Rinpa trademark. Stylized and abbreviated pine
trees embellish a set of Kenzan ceramic tiles, each of which features a verse by one

of the Thirty-six Poetic Immortals (cat. 66). One is decorated with pine shoots,
which would have been plucked as part of New Year’s celebrations held on the first
day of the first month of the lunar calendar, when poems for longevity would
also have been composed. A Kenzan-style water container used for tea gatherings
and a twentieth-century kimono manifest the formalization of pine trees in the

Rinpa visual imagination (cats. 69, 70), a treatment epitomized by Kamisaka
Sekka’s dramatic “Windswept Pines by the Shore,” from the book Flowers of a
Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa) (cat. 68). Several years earlier, Sekka had given the

same title to an abstract coastal landscape dotted with pines (cat. 67).
In East Asian art, pine, bamboo, and plum are known as the Three Friends
of Winter for their ability to persevere through cold and harsh conditions: a
symbol of the artist or intellectual enduring in an unsympathetic society. In con-
trast to Literati painters, who almost always depicted the Three Friends in mono-

chrome ink paintings, Rinpa artists experimented with the theme using a bright
palette, sometimes even gold, and usually relied on the tarashikomi technique to
add a distinctive touch. Sekka, for example, employed bright green to capture

the invigorating experience of seeing bamboo in freshly fallen snow as well as the
charming surprise of a small sparrow, shown peering back at the viewer (cat. 71).
In an experiment with the lacquer medium, he decorated a cabinet for tea imple-
ments with bamboo motifs in glistening gold (cat. 72).
Many lacquer artists at the end of the Edo period based their designs directly

on drawings by Rinpa masters such as Sakai Hōitsu, as seen in a design by Hara
Yōyūsai of a plum tree in blossom (cat. 73). Commen tators on the work of con-
temporary glass artist Fujita Kyōhei (1921 – 2004) have often remarked how his

complex but meticulously decorated surfaces recall the techniques of Edo period
maki-e lacquer. A lidded glass box by Kyōhei festooned with red and white plum designing nature
blossoms (cat. 74) echoes the abstracted forms in the works of Kōrin and his fol-
lowers, a late twentieth-century evocation of Rinpa’s coloristic experimentation.

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