Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection

Gallery view of the special exhibition Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection.

Painting Edo — the largest exhibition ever presented at the Harvard Art Museums — offers a window onto the supremely rich visual culture of Japan’s early modern era. Selected from the unparalleled collection of Robert S. and Betsy G. Feinberg, the more than 120 works in the exhibition connect visitors with a seminal moment in the history of Japan, as the country settled into an era of peace under the warrior government of the shoguns and opened its doors to greater engagement with the outside world. The dizzying array of artistic lineages and studios active during the Edo period (1615–1868) fueled an immense expansion of Japanese pictorial culture that reverberated not only at home, but subsequently in the history of painting in the West. In an act of extraordinary generosity, the Feinbergs have promised their collection of more than three hundred works to the Harvard Art Museums.

Pictorial Cultivation
The idealized East Asian scholar-recluse, or literatus, was a figure who valued public service, self-cultivation, and the pleasures of friendship above all else. In China, calligraphy and painting were an essential part of the practice of self-cultivation. Literati painters of the 11th century onward developed an expressive painting aesthetic based on visual amateurism, using inexpensive materials to produce pictures ostensibly meant to be shared with friends rather than sold for profit. In the early 18th century, printed painting manuals detailing the brush techniques and subjects central to continental literati painting arrived in Japan, where the style was untethered from the rich socio-literary context within which it had developed over centuries. By departing creatively from the printed guides, artists on the archipelago distinguished Edo literati painting from its continental counterpart in a variety of ways. They developed distinctive new brushstrokes and subjects, adapting elements from the intimate pictorial modes of the Chinese literatus to suit the large-scale format of the Japanese folding screen.