- Museum number
- 1978,0306,0.4.1-2
- Description
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Painting, pair of six-panel screens. Flowers and plants of the four seasons; about forty-five varieties of flowers and garden plants; also vegetables including eggplants, kidney beans, taros, and broad beans. Ink, colours and gold leaf on paper. Signed and sealed. In inscribed wooden storage box.
- Production date
- 1800-1818
- Dimensions
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Height: 90.50 centimetres (Actual height of screen including frame)
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Height: 78.40 centimetres (each)
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Width: 353.20 centimetres (each)
- $Inscriptions
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- Curator's comments
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The essence of Rinpa - a native Japanese school of art and design - was to simplify and flatten motifs and arrange these with great boldness across the surface of a painting or work of applied art.
No Chinese or other continental prototype for this style has yet been discovered. Here Hochu clearly has in mind the example of Ogata Korin (1658-1716), the quinessential Rinpa painter,when he arranges the malachite-green plants and brilliantly colourful flowers in audacious clumps against the gold-leaf ground. Hochu was born in Kyoto, but lived and worked for most of his career in Osaka, with a brief period taking the Rinpa style to Edo in the early 19th century. (Label copy, TTC 1997)
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Smith et al 1990
The mid-eighteenth century crane screens (no. 171) show a subdued side to Rinpa school painting, in restricted tones of black ink and pale pigments alone, but Hochu's paintings of plants and flowers on gold-leaf screens show Rinpa art at its most brilliant and gaudy. From dwarf azaleas and sprouting fern fronds of spring, through poppies, melons and aubergines of summer (right screen) and finally to Chinese bell flowers, chrysanthemums, bushclover, trailing beans and peppers of autumn (left screen, illustrated), a profusion of plants bloom in seasonal order across the twelve panels of gold leaf, with a true decorator's disregard for the relative sizes of nature. Though there is a basic concern to capture the fundamental character of each plant in simplified form - the spikiness of a rye grass or gentle curving of a branch heavy with berries - the flowers and leaves are mostly turned towards us, as if pressed, so as to display their elegant silhouettes against the gold. The green pigment of the leaves has been allowed to puddle and mix with other colours in an almost arbitrary way according to the 'tarashikomi' technique much used by Rinpa artists.
Though he lived almost a century after Ogata Korin (1658-1716), Hochu assiduously studied works by the earlier master. Indeed, he is best known to book lovers for a colour-printed album of designs after Korin, 'Korin gafu', published in 1802 during his stay in Edo.
FURTHER READING
Honolulu Academy of Arts, 'Exquisite visions: Rinpa Paintings from Japan', Honolulu, 1980.
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Hizo Nihon bijutsu taikan Vol 1
This well-known work is generally regarded as one of Hochu's masterpieces. The pair of six-fold screens employs a background of gold used for an array of brilliantly colored flowers that flourish between spring and fall. The work is evidently strongly influenced by paintings of flowers and plants in the Inen style, which was begun by Sotatsu and continued by Sosetsu. About forty-five varieties of flowers and garden plants are included here. Vegetables such as eggplants, kidney beans, taros, and broad beans are also in evidence and in fact are accorded a substantial amount of space. This kind of composition, giving vegetables a prominent place, has its precedents in works such as a six-fold screen in the collection of the Yamato Bunkakan and may reasonably be assumed to have been influenced by the Inen style. Hocchu's work rarely suggests so much of this influence; the same is true of the work of Edo-period artist Sakai Hoitsu and members of the Edo Rinpa school that he founded.
The rare stylistic similarities seen here may be related to the fact that the Inen-style painters were centered in the Kanazawa area, near enough to Kyoto to be within its cultural sphere. This is also the place where Hochu spent his career as a painter.
Hochu's distinctive style, needless to say, is also very much in evidence here. His style is characterized not so much by superior technical accomplishment as by the obvious delight he takes in his work. For instance, he imparts an emotional warmth by his untraditionally bold use of color. This work has an innocent, wholesome quality reminiscent of primitive art. In this respect Hochu's work also has something in common with the paintings of Sotatsu and Ogata Kenzan.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
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2022 23 Mar - 8 May, Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art, The Pictorial Arts and the Salon Culture of Kyoto and Osaka
- Acquisition date
- 1978
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- 1978,0306,0.4.1-2
- Additional IDs
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Asia painting number: Jap.Ptg.Add.574 (Japanese Painting Additional Number)