Kano School
New Year Plums and Pines
Item number: T-3082RSize: H 66.5" x W 140.9" (169,5 x 358 cm)
Age: 18th century
Pair of six-panel folding screens
Mineral pigments, ink, and gold leaf on paper
This imposing wall of young pines confronts the viewer, as if he or she were standing within a forest or garden. The wall of green appears unbroken, until one looks more carefully and notices the delicate branches of plum blossoms interweaving themselves among the pine trees.
This is a New Year’s screen, featuring two enduring New Year symbols, namely the plum and the pine: plums, since they blossom around New Year in the old lunar calendar, and pines, since they are the evergreen symbols of long life. At this time of the year, young pine trees, or kadomatsu, would be placed at the entrance of homes, heralding good wishes and an auspicious beginning to the new year. This painting would have been ideal for New Year’s gatherings, and likely served as the backdrop for many New Year’s meetings and ceremonies over its lifetime.
The painting is also a study of contrasts; part of its interest is the way that it displays different painting techniques in a dramatic manner. For example, the regular, linear branches of the pine trees are contrasted with the undulating, dragon-like branches of the plum, as they wind and turn across the screen surface. In order to make the plums stand out from the similarly colored pine branches, the artist relies on these acrobatic twists and turns. Likewise, the soft cattails of pine branches and treetops contrast with the sharp lines of the plum as they enter and cross the screen surface. Finally, the stylized repetitions of the pine branches contrast with the delicate and individualized plum blossoms, carefully drawn with thick white pigments, in order to make them stand out against the sea of green. Likewise, the mossy details on the plum branches are lovingly drawn, again to make them stand out against the soft greens and browns of the pine branches, symbolizing the energy and hope of newness in the Spring.
The eighteenth century saw new developments in the Kano school, which had to compete with many new artists, both within and outside established schools. As such, new ideas, startling visual effects, and witty meanings all came to have importance in the creation of paintings, even for the rather staid Kano school. Due to these impulses, works such as this pair came into being. Such works often have a central focus on a simple motif, such as a type of plant, flowering trees, or a broad landscape of some kind, and then incorporate other, more subtle, motifs. The calculated effect was to surprise the viewer as he or she drew nearer to the screen.1 In the present case, the new element is the rivalry between the plum as representative of youthful vitality and willful individualism, acrobatically competing with the more staid, repetitive, and long-lasting pine. The way in which this painting of the most conservative of topics, New Year imagery, succeeds in breathing life into these symbols is freshly innovative and delightfully imaginative.
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