painting
- Museum number
- 1881,1210,0.2484
- Description
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Album leaf, painting. Group of small birds and details of wings and heads. One of forty-seven pictures from an album of birds (JP 2703-2749). Ink and colour on paper. Inscribed.
- Production date
- 1792
- Dimensions
-
Height: 28.10 centimetres
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Width: 40.70 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
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Hizo Nihon bijutsu taikan Vol 2
The present work consists of forty-seven leaves bearing sketches of birds, together with another leaf with a postscript, the original having been bound together as a single album (see Monochrome Plates 30-48). The sketches are a copy by Noda Tomin of an earlier copy of Kano Tan'yu's 'Sketches of Various Birds' - then in the possession of Kano Toshun, fourth head of the Surugadai Kano school - made by Toshun's pupil Ogiwara Tokitsu.
Kano Tan'yu (1602-74), the man who established the dominant style of Edo-period painting, laying the foundation for the huge organization of official shogunate painters, is also known for his copies of large numbers of old paintings and for his numerous sketches of flora and fauna.
Already in his time, artists of the Kano school were being given the task of painting from life, as a record for posterity, pictures of unusual animals and plants. This new trend was not unrelated to the sudden popularity of botanical studies; some painters of the Kano school were being required to produce paintings corresponding to today's illustrated catalogues of flora and fauna, and it seems quite possible that Kano Tan'yu's sketches were, themselves, a response to such a demand. The sketches of birds that Tan'yu left were repeatedly copied by his followers as models for their own work. Painters of the Kano school acquired their technique via a thoroughgoing reliance on the copying of models, and the postscript to this album confirms that this extended to sketches originally made from life.
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'同民・・・良俊' (unattributed annotation in the specially interleaved Japanese Study Room copy of Anderson 1886)
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1881
- Acquisition notes
- The collection of over 2,000 Japanese and Chinese paintings assembled by Prof. William Anderson during his residency in Japan, 1873-1880, was acquired by the Museum in 1881. The items were not listed in the register, but rather were published separately as the 'Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of a Collection of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum' (Longmans & Co, 1886).
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- 1881,1210,0.2484
- Additional IDs
-
Asia painting number: Jap.Ptg.2740 (Japanese Painting Number)