Attributed to Hasegawa Tohaku (1539-1610), Trees in Foggy Landscape, End of Muromachi period (1392-1573), beginning of Momoyama (1573-1615). Photo courtesy Helena Markus Antique Japanese Screens.

Six-panel screen. Ink on gold leaf with kin sunago (gold sand). H 166.5 x W 360 cm

Gold clouds run the entire length of the screen separating the foreground scenery from the distant hills and suggesting a sense of spatial recession. Mist, formed by the use of kin sunago (gold sand), drifts over the trees and hills.
The artist expresses the essence of the subject with economy of means, and achieves a decorative effect in a quiet and subtle manner. Ink tones vary from pitch black to pearl gray.
The sky is also filled with sand-like gold glitter. The golden clouds or banks of mist drifting across the composition, provide stark contrast to the dark ink tonalities of the trees and to the dark grey and misty clouds. The gold here is used by the artist to create an atmosphere of almost magic mystery around the completely leafless autumn plants.
The spray of gold cloud-like formations are engaging not only because of their decorative effect but also because of their reflective surface. Traditional Japanese interiors are gloomy, and so the flickering light from a candle mirrored on such golden patches proved both aesthetically pleasing and practical.

The screen can be probably attributed to Hasegawa Tohaku or to one of his students. Hasegawa was a painter of great versatility and force, and hence he embraced several styles of painting in colours and ink. Until quite recently he was known primarily for his unique suiboku, ink and wash style, which he had evolved from Toyo Sesshu (1420-1506) and from the great Chinese Song (960 - 1279) masters Mu Qi and Liang Kai. Their influence can be seen in this painting in the way the artist makes use of the ink and renders the mist. Tohaku would transform his borrowings at every step. He took the extremely abbreviated and sharp ink manner of Liang Kai while from Sesshu he learned not only the typical style of the so-called northern Chinese painting but also the softer, more watery hazes, so typical of Sesshu’s style.
From the fusion of these elements evolved one of Tohaku’s masterpieces, the famous screen Trees in a Fog housed in the Tokyo National Museum. The brushwork here is indebted to the great Chinese models, but the placement and space division, the emptiness and the poetic atmosphere are characteristically Japanese, if not uniquely Tohaku’s.
An examination of the whole oeuvre of Tohaku shows all the necessary preliminary steps, leading from his early Buddhist icons, with the use of much gold decoration, through a Tosa apprenticeship in colour painting, past the ink landscapes with gold wash in the background which our screen is a good example of, and on to golden screens with large trees and colourful blossoms.

During the Muromachi period, a system of training and retaining painters emerged, that would dominate the painting world in Japan until the late nineteenth century. Kano Motonobu (1476-1559) established the family-based school on a firm footing and developed methods to enable the reliable transmission of technique and style to his students.
During a long period of apprenticeship and training, painters in such an atelier system learned the profession by faithfully copying the style of the most distinguished members of the school, usually its official head. They were so rigorously trained that their brushwork could be virtually indistinguishable from their master’s. It is possible to attribute unsigned works only by close comparison with accepted works, and even then scholarly disagreements are numerous, even the presence of a seal is unreliable for this purpose, as students might also use the master’s seal. Notwithstanding such difficulties, patrons of the time would in any case have been less concerned with which specific hands produced the commissioned piece and more interested in obtaining the “Kano-school look”, which spoke to the aspiration of the power and culture prestige. This look was a result of the combined contributions of the studio members.

Provenance: Japan.

Helena Markus Antique Japanese Screens. MasterArt at TEFAF 2014. 14-23 march 2014 - http://www.masterart.com/