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Detail, Ladies Among Cherry
Trees
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Continuing indefinitely
Freer Gallery of Art |
The nearly two
hundred screens held by the Freer Gallery constitute one of the
most important collections of its type in the world. Ranging in
date from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the screens
represent the major thematic and stylistic examples of this popular
format.
Particular strengths of the Freer collection of Japanese screens
include works featuring detailed representations of daily life,
in forms ranging from visual quotations from classical literature
to celebratory depictions of bustling urban life of the seventeenth
century. The omnipresent influence of revered Chinese aesthetic
sensibilities can be seen in an array of ink monochrome landscapes,
as can the influence of such Japanese artists as the early-seventeenth-century
master Tawaraya Sotatsu (d. 1643), whose importance Charles Lang
Freer (1854–1919) was the first Western collector to grasp.
Sotatsu's revival of ancient court styles in a modern mode can
be viewed alongside works by painters who carried on his lineage.
While most screens in the Freer collection are in their original
format, some paintings were actually created for placement on
sliding door panels. When the panels were destroyed or dismantled,
fragments were salvaged and remounted on folding screens. Colorful
early-seventeenth-century renderings of herons and pheasants that
were part of a sliding door ensemble created for the Akashi Castle
near Kobe serve as excellent examples of this restructuring. The
paintings were rescued from a fire that destroyed the castle around
1635.
Modern expectations of traditional Japanese aesthetics are confounded
by an important pair of six-panel screens by Kano Motonobu (1476–1559)
that display a series of discrete ink monochrome landscape scenes
set within a lush background of colored landscape and cloud-patterned
gold leaf. This combination of austerity and flamboyance reveals
a dimension of sixteenth-century Japanese taste that has yet to
be thoroughly explored.
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Online Exhibitions
Masterful Illusions: Japanese Prints from the Anne van Biema Collection
More Japanese Art
• Contemporary Japanese Porcelain
Japanese Art in Our Collections
Yokohama Boomtown
Yokohama Boomtown: Foreigners in Treaty-Port Japan (1859–1872), part of the MIT Visualizing Cultures project
Pacific Asia Museum
Nature of the Beast: Animals in Japanese Paintings and Prints, an online interactive by the Pacific Asia Museum
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