Page 386 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

Less dramatic than the opening topography is
that which closes the composition at the far left:
bamboo and a bare tree projecting from a gently
sloping bank. A pair of doves on the bank and a
pair of magpies above them on a branch of the
bare tree offer striking contrast between soft
shading and sharp black-and-white. To the right
of the magpies and below them, partly obscured
in water weeds, is a pair of mandarin ducks. The
stream carries one's eye gently from right to left,
perhaps suggesting a sequence of seasons along its
banks; the birds, in vivid counterpoint, form a
sharp zigzag across the two screens.
The centrality of the lotuses in the composition
made this painting thoroughly appropriate for a
celebration within a Pure Land Buddhist estab-
lishment. Viewers accustomed to paintings of the
White-Robed Kannon seated on a rock dais beside
a pool or stream would not fail to discern the
humorous intent in a gaggle of Chinese mynah
birds at the extreme right of the right-hand
screen—just where one would expect a depiction
of the sacred figure. J.u.

227

Shugetsu Tokan
I44o(?)-i529
HERONS, WILLOWS, AND
PRUNUS IN SNOW

c. 1500
Japanese
pair of hanging scrolls; ink on paper
96.3 X 32.3 (j8 X 12 /4J
3
two signatures and two seals of the artist
The Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art

The righthand scroll shows a plumed white heron
preening its feathers on a willow branch; in the
lefthand scroll another white heron rests on one
leg on a snow-covered outcropping beneath a
prunus branch mantled in snow and enlivened by
a few tentative blossoms. Both paintings are
signed and sealed by the artist.
Birds and snow are shown in reserve, as sil-
houettes of white paper against the surrounding
ink wash, with the birds' legs and bills, and the
branches beneath the snow, in dramatically dark
strokes of ink. Particularly in the lefthand scroll Shugetsu was a monk-painter from the Satsu- Shugetsu's relationship to Sesshu as pupil and
this technique was used to perfection, resulting ma domain in Kyushu, a subject of the Shimazu successor is confirmed by most of his few extant
in an image at once clearly depicted and sugges- daimyo clan. He became a friend and follower works: the "splashed-ink" (hatsuboku) landscape
tive. This reverse technique was practiced in of Sesshu (1420-1506) at that famous artist's in the Cleveland Museum; the Reeds and Wild
thirteenth-century China by painters associated with studio in present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture, the Geese formerly in the Otsuka collection, Tokyo;
the Chan (Zen) Buddhist sect; its use there is Unkoku-an. In 1490 Sesshu's gift of a self-portrait and a few landscapes in Sesshu's sharply defined
exemplified in a hanging scroll by Luo-Chuang of attested Shugetsu's position as his pupil and hon- (shin) style.
a rooster, now in the Tokyo National Museum. ored successor. The supposition that he accompa- The present work, however, is only superfi-
Surprisingly, the method seems to have been nied Sesshu on his famous visit to China in cially related in style to Sesshu's screens (see cat.
scarcely known in Japan by 1500, the approximate 1468-1469 is probably false; a visit in the early 233). Sesshu never used reverse wash technique
date of Shugetsu's painting. 14905, though also suppositional, is more likely. in its purest form but always supplemented it

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