Page 22 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

Godoshi [the Tang-dynasty painter Wu Daozi] and Sōtatsu, Kōetsu, and their successors, this very prolifera-

Sesshu [the Muromachi-period ink painter Sesshū tion, rather than simplifying matters, in fact complicates
Tōyō]. The æsthetic purity and loftiness of both the process of designating discrete oeuvres for the Rinpa

line and colour come out in perfect combination. 19 masters. What we discover is that each great artist — each
famous “name” — had assistants who worked under his
At some point in the screen’s history, the “Spring” (right) direct supervision or, more commonly, emulated the mas-
and “Autumn” (left) panels were separated, and in 1904, ter’s style either without his knowledge or following his

at the auction of famed nineteenth-century connoisseur death. There were also talented pupils or followers who
Charles Gilot’s (1853 – 1903) estate in Paris, “Autumn” copied the master’s signature style and made close replicas
was offered for sale as a work by ogata Kenzan, Kōrin’s of seals.
younger brother. The Metropolitan eventually acquired it It thus remains an ongoing project for specialists to dis-

in 1915 from the prestigious dealer Yamanaka and Com- tinguish among the different hands, and in some cases their
pany. In 1949 the “Spring” screen came into the Museum’s names will never be discovered. Rather than viewing
collection and was reunited with “Autumn” as Spring and this as a matter of consternation, we should instead judge
Autumn Trees and Grasses by a Stream. Together, the set each work on its own merits and delight in the achieve-
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bridges the archaic Sōtatsu style, seen in the rendering of ments of those talented (if anonymous) painters in the
the pine trees (the style of Kitagawa Sōsetsu is also manifest Sōtatsu style of the seventeenth century, a style that marked
in the flowers and grasses) with the pure Kōrin mode of the first stage in the development of a distinctive pictorial
the stream, underscoring that Kōrin learned the basic aesthetic even before the term “Rinpa” existed. Sōtatsu

vocabulary for evoking waves from the Sōtatsu-Sōsetsu and Kōetsu could never have anticipated the impact their
tradition. Rather than pastiche, the composition should collaborations would have on the painters and calligra-
be seen as a transitional work that either inspired Kōrin or phers who followed in their footsteps, nor could the artists
was inspired by him. The confusion over the identifica- of the Sōtatsu studio imagine how replications of their

tion, which has led various experts of the past century collective output would become the foundation for a new
to attribute the works to Kōetsu, the Sōtatsu studio, “school” of painting.
Kōrin, and, perplexingly, even Kenzan, as noted above,
whose style it in no way resembles, bespeaks the chal-

lenges of creating a coherent history of Rinpa.
Every generation of patrons, collectors, and other
cognoscenti has formed its own collective consensus over
what belongs or does not belong to each artist’s respective

corpus. Although modern scholars have the advantage of designing nature
historical hindsight and easy access through publications and
archives to countless images of works by and attributed to

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