Travelling with Rosetsu

Orientations | Volume 49 Number 5 | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 Travelling with Rosetsu Matthew McKelway S ometime late in 1786 Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754– 99), an up-and-coming painter from Kyoto, embarked on a sojourn to the port of Kushimoto at the southernmost tip of the Kii peninsula (Nanki) on Honshū, the main island of the Japanese archipelago. The young painter would stay there until early spring the following year, producing pictures on sliding panels, folding screens and hanging scrolls for temples and local patrons in the Nanki region. The legacy of Rosetsu’s efforts is a staggering number of paintings executed in the same region during the short time span of about six months, in the kind of unity of time, place and action that distinguishes the greatest of stories. Like other artists who travelled, such as Yosa Buson (1716–84) and Soga Shōhaku (1730–81), Rosetsu responded in his work to the local environment and customs of the Nanki region and other locales to which he travelled, often in unexpected ways. This article briefly examines the impact of travel on his art, one of the themes explored in depth through another journey, of his paintings to the Museum Rietberg in Zurich this autumn for the exhibition ‘ROSETSU: Ferocious Brush’ (6 September–4 November 2018). This exhibition, the first international loan show to focus solely on Rosetsu’s paintings, promises to offer new insights into his career and to reconsider previous assessments of the artist. The examination of his paintings will also present fresh perspectives on the roles of regional patronage and the nascent culture of art exhibition in late Edo period (1603–1867) Japan. The Nanki project was one of several that would take Rosetsu beyond the familiar and culturally stimulating environment of Kyoto, the city where he embarked on his painting career in the 1770s. In later years Rosetsu would also journey to the ancient capital of Nara, to the Banshū region near presentday Kobe, and to Hiroshima. Throughout his career he painted for patrons in other far-flung areas that he does not appear to have visited, such as Izumo on the Sea of Japan and Hara on the Tōkaidō route along the Pacific coast. As someone who benefited from a wide network of patrons outside Kyoto, Rosetsu joined the company of other prominent painters, from Buson and Shōhaku to Ike Taiga (1723–76) and Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800). This eclectic group shared both their common origins or location in Kyoto and a reluctance to follow the ageing, yet still prevalent academic style of the Kano school, whose painters continued to produce images for the Tokugawa shoguns in Edo (today’s Tokyo) and the network of military elites loyal to them. The painting of late 18th century Kyoto is distinguished by such individualism and originality that the writer Ban Kōkei (1733–1806) included Taiga and his wife Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727–84) in his Biographies of Eccentrics of Recent Times (Kinsei kijin den; 1790), and in modern times, Shōhaku, Jakuchū and Rosetsu have been designated the ‘three eccentrics’ of 18th century Kyoto. The daring creativity of these painters appealed to patrons throughout Japan, particularly temples, wealthy farmers and merchants, whose artistic preferences were not dictated or influenced by the ruling authorities. Evidently, the demands and preferences of Rosetsu’s patrons outside Kyoto contributed to his sources of inspiration as much as the local circumstances in which he found himself on his Fig. 1 Tiger (detail) By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1786 Six sliding door panels, ink on paper; two right panels, each: 180 x 87 cm; four left panels, each: 183.5 x 115.5 cm Muryō-ji, Kushimoto Important Cultural Property 24 25 Orientations | Volume 49 Number 5 | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 Fig. 2 Chinese Children at Play (detail) By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1786 Eight sliding door panels, ink on paper; four right panels, each: 179.3 x 91.5 cm; four left panels, each: 183.5 x 115.5 cm Muryō-ji, Kushimoto travels. By the late 1760s, his painting master Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–95), founder of the Maruyama–Shijō school of painters, had reached a workable formula that combined rigorous brushwork with modelled forms and plausible pictorial space to achieve a greater degree of realism in his pictures. Ōkyo transmitted his newly naturalistic style through a team of studio assistants, who perpetuated it into the 19th century, securing along the way such prestigious commissions as the paintings for the recently rebuilt imperial palace in 1790. In contrast to Ōkyo, Rosetsu continued to change his style into the last years of his life, never satisfied with a singular approach to painting. Although his career was cut short by his untimely death in 1799, Rosetsu managed in the short space of about two decades to produce pictures ranging from the daringly bold and dramatic to the meticulously naturalistic to works verging on abstraction to the quietly lyrical. It is difficult to find another painter in the history of Japanese art who possessed such a multivalent vision prior to Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), who was born six years after Rosetsu. How did his frequent travels away from Kyoto affect Rosetsu’s choices of styles and subjects of painting? Rosetsu initially went to Nanki in the autumn of 1786 to outfit with interior paintings a group of newly rebuilt Zen Buddhist temples affiliated with the monastery Tōfuku-ji in Kyoto. The great Hōei earthquake of 1707 had generated a series of tsunamis that wrecked these temples, and decades 26 of fundraising were required for their restoration. The Illustrative Guide to the Famous Places of Kii Province (Kinokuni meisho zue [Takechi Shiyū, Takeuchi Katei, Nishimura Chūwa, Ikeda Tōri and Shitomi Kangyū, eds], 1851) recounts how the abbot Gukai Bunpō (d. 1803), the head priest of Muryō-ji, had commissioned Ōkyo to decorate his temple; by the time the reconstruction was finished in 1785, Ōkyo found himself too busy and sent Rosetsu to complete the project in his stead. Although the origins of Rosetsu’s involvement with the temples Muryō-ji, Jōju-ji and Sōdō-ji were probably more complicated than this—he was already well acquainted with prominent priests at Myōshin-ji by the early 1780s— the presence of room paintings by Ōkyo in two of the temples, Sōdō-ji and Muryō-ji, from 1785 and 1786, respectively, verifies his original connection to the project. It is likely that Rosetsu took Ōkyo’s panels to the temples to be installed with his own panels. uryō-ji possesses the largest and most important group of paintings Rosetsu produced in Nanki and demonstrates how, once away from the capital and the influence of Ōkyo, he arrived at his own vision, which would flourish in the succeeding years. Dragon and Tiger, two works on sliding panels which Rosetsu painted for the temple’s central chamber (the space in which the priest carries out rituals in front of the temple’s main image), are among his boldest paintings (Fig. 1). A dragon barely contained by the frame of the six sliding panels M emerges from inky mist and faces off with a tiger that Nobuo Tsuji famously likened to a ‘benign housecat’ (Tsuji, 2012, p. 161). Rosetsu at once placed these motifs in flanking positions that underscore their role as protectors of the Buddha and imbued them with a subtle humour. Humour is at work in other paintings at Muryōji, too, most clearly in Chinese Children at Play, in which Rosetsu parodies the ‘four gentlemanly accomplishments’ (J. kinkishoga), a much-vaunted theme common in Kyoto’s medieval Zen temples. Here he transforms the usual depiction of stately Chinese scholars practising the art of music (on the zither; J. kin), the game of go (J. ki), calligraphy (or writing; J. sho) and painting (J. ga) into a raucous scene of a temple schoolroom, where children paint and practise writing but are more interested in playing with their brushes and a group of puppies (Fig. 2). The region in which Rosetsu was active from 1786 to 1787 stretches from Koza and Kushimoto at the Kii peninsula’s southernmost point to Shirahama and Tanabe along the coast to the west. Surveys by art historians in the early 20th century revealed that Rosetsu’s activities extended beyond the Zen temples into the homes of local residents, and families who continue to live mere steps away from Muryō-ji still own works by Rosetsu (Doi, 1939). In a pair of screens now in the possession of Kushimoto township, four parrots are arranged tethered to their perches in four distinct poses: in profile, asleep, with open beak and wing outstretched, and hanging from the perch, ornamental tassels dangling beneath (Fig. 3). Rosetsu’s utmost attention to representational accuracy suggests that he took advantage of the opportunity to observe captive, tame parrots closely. Parrots were not native to Japan: they numbered among the rare ‘objects’ regularly imported through trade with China and the Netherlands, were collected by the wealthy, and were exhibited in carnival displays. Although fantastic rock formations and natural arches make the Kii peninsula one of the most dramatic coastlines in Japan, Rosetsu appears not to have represented these seascapes in his paintings in the region, concentrating instead on more intimate scenes of local flavour. In a triptych he painted for a family in the neighbourhood of Muryō-ji, he groups a boy balancing a mouse on his hand with three sparrows under a long stalk of bamboo and a cat sitting under a sago palm (J. sotetsu) (Fig. 4). His composition comes across as so natural that it is easy to miss the painstaking way he calibrated the three images, placing the mouse at the apex of this gathering of small creatures, its gaze directed at uncertain dangers below, while the sparrows merrily chirp at a safe distance from potential feline peril. Each motif is common and familiar at Muryōji today, where stray cats still prowl and ancient sago palms stand, giving us a glimpse of the sort of scene Rosetsu himself might have seen every day. Rosetsu no doubt delighted his local audience with such works, perhaps returning their hospitality in the 27 Orientations | Volume 49 Number 5 | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 tradition of the ‘ink guest’ (J. bokkyaku) by providing them with such amusing pictures. Rosetsu spent the years after his time in Nanki primarily in Kyoto, although the Tenmei fire of 1788 forced him and many other painters, including Ōkyo and Jakuchū, to leave the city temporarily. By 1790, Rosetsu had returned again to Kyoto, having established patrons in Nara, where he produced sliding-panel paintings for the temple Yakushi-ji, and in Takasago, a town between present-day Kobe and the castle town of Himeji. During these years he also came into contact with the Fujii family of kimono merchants, who maintained branches of their main shop, the Fujiya, in Kyoto and their native Hiroshima. In 1792 Fujii Masaharu (d. 1796) commissioned Rosetsu to produce a votive painting (J. ema) of a mother monkey and her child for Hiyoshi Taisha, the ancient shrine on the east face of Mt Hiei, where Japanese macaques were believed to be messengers of its deities. As is the case for many ema, centuries of exposure to the elements have severely damaged the picture, but another painting of a monkey by Rosetsu conveys the ema’s general appearance and brings out the expressive depth, even pathos, he instilled in his pictures of animals (Fig. 5). F ujii Masaharu’s commission prompted Rosetsu to journey to Hiroshima, where he was the guest of the family for several months in 1794. The art historian Taki Seiichi (1873–1945) first identified a group of eleven works by Rosetsu in Hiroshima collections in 1935; Wadaka Nobuji later traced their provenance to two members of the Mikuniya branch of the Fujii family whose business was in lending money–Fujii Kazushichirō Masayoshi, fourthgeneration head of the Mikuniya, and his younger brother Eijirō (both dates unknown) (Wadaka, 1977). The house of Mikuniya was located in Nakajima near the main Fujiya kimono store in the central Ōtemachi district of the city and evidently provided Rosetsu with lodgings during his stay. Rosetsu appears to have painted exclusively for these merchant patrons in Hiroshima, focusing on hanging scrolls and smaller formats such as the accordion album and handscroll Fig. 3 Parrots By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1786 Pair of two-panel screens, ink and light colour on paper, each: 117 x 44.3 cm Kushimoto-chō 28 Fig. 4 Cat, Boy, and Sparrows By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1786 Three hanging scrolls, ink and light colour on paper, each: 103.4 x 56 cm Private collection, Japan Fig. 5 Monkey on a Rock (detail) By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1792–94 Framed panel, ink and colour on gold ground, 116.9 x 196.2 cm Private collection, Japan 29 Orientations | Volume 49 Number 5 | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 soon obscure the oddly elongated mountain. The subject of the painting, Mt Fuji, carried auspicious associations for the Fujiya clients in its homophonous relationship to both the family name, Fujii (‘wisteria well’) and the name of their enterprise, Fujiya (‘House of Fuji’). In Japan, Mt Fuji came to be associated with the mythical abode of immortals at Mt Penglai and was often depicted with cranes, birds noted for their symbolic associations with long life and good luck. Fig. 6 ‘Lanterns at Itsukushima’, from Eight Views of Miyajima By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1794 Album leaf, one of a set of eight, ink and colour on silk, 34 x 47 cm Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Government of Japan R Fig. 7 Cranes Flying Past Mt Fuji By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1794 Hanging scroll, ink and light colour on silk, 157 x 70.5 cm Private collection, Japan 30 rather than on the large paintings on sliding panels he had executed in the Nanki region. Another key difference from the Nanki works is that Rosetsu’s Hiroshima images respond directly to the local topography, particularly the scenic island of Miyajima, home of the famed Itsukushima Shrine. The mountains, the Inland Sea vistas, the tame deer and the ancient halls of the shrine appear to have enchanted Rosetsu, who repeatedly recast the island as the mythical Mt Penglai, the island of immortality of ancient Chinese lore, known in Japanese as Mt Hōrai. Virtually every picture Rosetsu completed for his Fujii patrons in Hiroshima refers in some way to Mt Penglai or to Miyajima, either as a direct representation or through indirect allusion. The album Eight Views of Miyajima traverses the island’s topography, seasons and times of the day and evening in lyrical, poignant images. ‘Lanterns at Itsukushima’ begins the series by marking the New Year, when stone lanterns illuminate the shrine and the nearby shore with a faint glow (Fig. 6). Rosetsu has portrayed only the shrine buildings in clear focus, and blurred the torii gate, surrounding groves of trees and distant mountains as if they fade from view in the failing light of dusk. In Cranes Flying Past Mt Fuji, Rosetsu presents an unforgettable vision of Japan’s sacred peak (Fig. 7). The cranes’ flight formation and diagonal trajectory make it seem as if we, too, are borne aloft in rising mists that will osetsu also painted at least three images of Mt Penglai, in vivid mineral colours and gold on silk. In one of the two paintings on this theme he produced for patrons in Hiroshima, he presents a vision of the isle in light colours, with human inhabitants, and from a low point of view, as if approached along a sandbar on which a group of turtles crawl forth (Fig. 8). Over islands studded with pines and blossoming peach trees, immortals descend to their mountaintop pavilions on the backs of flying cranes in a fantasy vision. His interweaving of Miyajima and Mt Penglai apparently reflects popular belief in the late Edo period: the woodblockprinted book Itsukushima zue (Illustrations of Itsukushima; 1842) includes in its third volume a depiction of boaters viewing the pavilions of Mt Penglai, which appear as a mirage above the sea. The descriptive text goes on to explain the phenomenon as the result of ‘golden ethers’ (J. kinki) released from the seabed, which in ‘four directions around Itsukushima’ was covered with gold sand—just as Rosetsu represented it in his painting. The 1794 sojourn in Hiroshima was Rosetsu’s last extended stay outside Kyoto, where in the late 1790s he would produce ever more experimental pictures, encouraged by his friend, the Confucian scholar Minagawa Kien (1734–1807). Kien initiated a series of biannual exhibitions of works by contemporary painters and calligraphers in the Maruyama area of Kyoto from 1792 to 1798. In 1799, he recounted the impetus for these events: For a long time, in the hopes of promoting painting and calligraphy in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, I have been inviting artists I know to gather on a certain day in spring and autumn of each year in Higashiyama, Kyoto, bringing their own works with them. I call this the Shinshoga tenkan [Exhibitions of New Calligraphy and Painting]. From Kansei 4 [1792] to last year, Kansei 10 [1798], they were held fourteen times, and each time three to four hundred scrolls were exhibited. As the reputation [of the exhibitions] spread, people from abroad attended, making them truly successful. The calligraphers and painters of Kyoto who thronged to these occasions competed to create novel and bizarre works. (MInagawa, 1986, pp. 293–94; translation based in part on Tsuji and Murakami, 2017, p. 219) Fig. 8 Mt Penglai By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1794 Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 56.6 x 83.7 cm Private collection, Japan 31 Orientations | Volume 49 Number 5 | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 Fig. 9 Five Hundred Arhats By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1798 Hanging scroll, ink and light colour on paper, 3.1 x 3.1 cm Private collection, Japan One of Rosetsu’s submissions to the exhibitions survives: Five Hundred Arhats would be a tour de force of figural composition even if it had been many times larger than its minute scale of just over 3 by 3 centimetres (Fig. 9). The Buddha’s disciples, along with a tiger, a lion, an elephant and a dragon, inhabit a space framed by pines and green hills, every motif precisely coloured within its outlines. Perhaps even more remarkable than the physical feat of producing this image, during the same years Rosetsu produced boldly conceived images that begin to slip into abstraction. The pair of six-panel screens Landscapes with the Chinese Literati Su Shi and Tao Qian shows us his last great essay in landscape painting (Fig. 10). These breathtaking images, executed in monochrome ink on screens sheathed in gold foil, amplify the abstracted forms of his earlier landscapes. The screens are ostensibly rooted in familiar imagery from classical Chinese literature, such as Tao Qian’s (365–427) willows and a flock of geese, on the right screen, and on the left screen steep, cavernous forms, evoking Su Shi’s (1036–1101) Red Cliff. The spontaneity of the landscapes on gold announces itself in the sweeping movements of a large brush and abundant passages of dripping ink, as if Rosetsu had painted them before an audience. These landscapes exude the brash self-confidence of Rosetsu’s later work, and may also be memoryimages evoking the painter’s expedition to Nanki and its fantastic coastlines. Perhaps the years in Kyoto made Rosetsu long again for the freedom and inspiration he had gained on his youthful journey. Matthew McKelway is Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History at Columbia University. Selected bibliography Aimi Kōu, ‘Rosetsu monogatari’, in Nakano Mitsutoshi and Kikutake Jun’ichi, eds, Aimi Kōu shū, Nihon shoshigaku taikei 45–3, vol. 3, Musashimurayama, 1986, pp. 319–36 and 337–43. Chiba City Museum of Art and Wakayama Prefectural Museum, eds, Botsugo 200 nen kinen: Nagasawa Rosetsu, exh. cat., Tokyo, 2000. Doi Tsugiyoshi, ‘Nanki no Rosetsu ga ni tsuite’, Kokuhō 2, no. 12 (1939): 332–38 and 344–51. Kinkōzan Muryōji and Kushimoto Ōkyo-Rosetsu Kan, eds, Yōkoso Muryōji e: Ōkyo, Rosetsu no meisaku fusuma-e, Kushimoto, 2011. Kiyoshi Okada, ed., Itsukushima zue, vol. 3 of 10, Osaka, 1842. <pulverer.si.edu/node/1183/title/3> Minagawa Kien, Kien shibunshū, vol. 9, in Takahashi Hiromi, ed., Kinsei juka bunshū shūsei, Tokyo, 1986. Moriyasu Osamu, ‘Kansei-ki no Rosetsu’, in Kano Hiroyuki, ed., ‘Nagasawa Rosetsu: Senpen banka no entaateinaa’, special issue, Taiyō: Nihon no kokoro 181 (March 2011): 106–35. Nobuo Tsuji (Aaron M. Rio, trans.), Lineage of Eccentrics: Matabei to Kuniyoshi, Tokyo, 2012. — and Takashi Murakami (Christopher Stephens and Yuko Sakata, trans.), Nobuo Tsuji vs. Takashi Murakami: Battle Royale! Japanese Art History, Tokyo, 2017. Wadaka Nobuji, ‘Kansei-ki no Rosetsu ga: Rosetsu geijutsu no jitsuzō tsuikyū e no kokoromi zen nikai no kikakuten o agete’, in Wakayama Prefectural Museum, ed., Kansei-ki no Rosetsu, Wakayama, 1977, n.p.. Yamakawa Takeshi, ‘Nagasawa Rosetsu to sono Nanki ni okeru sakuhin’, Kokka 860 (November 1963): 5–57. Fig. 10 Landscapes with the Chinese Literati Su Shi and Tao Qian By Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–99), 1796–99 Pair of six-panel screens, ink on gold ground, each: 171.1 x 372.7 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Harry G. C. Packard Collection of Asian Art, Gift of Harry G. C. Packard, and Purchase, Fletcher, Rogers, Harris Brisbane Dick, and Louis V. Bell Funds, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and The Annenberg Fund Inc. Gift, 1975 (1975.268.75, .76) 32 33