Hasegawa School, anonymous artist
Flowering Wisteria
Item number: T-3237RSize: H 64.8" x W 145.3" (164.5 x 369 cm)
Age: 18th century
Pair of six-panel folding screens
Mineral pigments, ink and gofun on gold leaf
A remarkable pair of six-panel screens with a luxurious detailed display of the flowers and wildlife of late spring. The focal point of the screens is unmistakably centered on a glorious proliferation of flowering wisteria plants. In the left screen, the wisteria plants grow over a bamboo lattice and fence, seeming to overpower the structure with their exuberance. In the right screen, the wisteria flowers appear from behind a garden fence and grow by an aged pine tree in the garden. In both screens, we see an interesting contrast between the domesticated and the wild, the garden and nature: the two worlds seem to overlap and in-teract with each other and the artist deliberately leaves the boundary between them ambiguous. Other plants appear as well, such as the low-lying bamboo in the left screen and a splendid growth of tree peony (shakuyaku) in the right screen. The two screens are linked by the depiction of a pond, within which we see lovingly detailed groups of
the flowering water lilies (hitsujigusa).
This luxurious hideaway from society is visited by various flying objects: the screen to the right by three red-breasted Daurian Redstarts (jōbitaki) and the left screen by several types of butterflies. They seem to thoroughly enjoy their private place of refuge. The butterflies can be seen playfully flying together, and, splashing into the water, a bird forms delightful finger-like patterns of water around it. The two right-most panels of the left screen reveal a virtuosic brush display by the artist, as he lovingly created a network of wisteria vines that seems to want to take flight, reaching out for the flying butterflies just beyond its reach.
This glorious pair of screens is made in the eighteenth century by an anonymous artist. Judging from the style of the work and the luxurious use of mineral colors, the artist may have been part of a workshop that produced screens for the interiors of the wealthy: the merchant houses, restaurants, temples, and homes of the aristocracy. With periodic fires being a fact of urban living in pre-modern Japan, there was always a market for refined works of art to place within architectural interiors. At peace and with a mostly flourishing commerce, eighteenth century Japan underwent an especially rich flowering of its arts and culture, and this painting bears evidence to its riches in both the use of luxurious materials and in the sheer energy of expression.
Other examples of wisteria screens with similar compositions can be seen in the Nihon byōbue shūsei. According to Nakajima Junshi such screens date from the eighteenth century. In fact, all the screens (including the present screen pair) may stem from the same source, one that Nakajima ascribes to »mid-Edo variations of the Hasegawa School.«1 The existence of an additional wisteria screen pair of earlier date signed Hasegawa Sōen (ac. 17th century), in the collection of the Seianji Temple 盛安寺 in Shiga Prefecture, further heightens the likelihood that the present pair of screens was created by a follower of the Hasegawa School.2
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