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.

Eccentricity
Affiliation with a lineage or school was central to the self-identity of the majority of Edo painters. Artists who chose to operate outside these structures could pursue greater creative freedom, developing their own style of brushwork and signature approaches to color or traditional themes, but they also faced greater social and economic challenges. As a result, numerous achievements by apparently unaffiliated painters went unrecognized until the postwar era, when several gifted artists were written into a new “lineage of eccentrics” that brought them into the art historical mainstream and celebrated their status as highly individualistic nonconformists. However, contemporary understanding of eccentricity as a psychological state differs from its meaning during the Edo period, when the concept instead encompassed the strange and the supernatural, the talents of the idealized scholar-recluse, and the elegant disregard of social norms—themes embodied by the paintings in this gallery.