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.

Expansion of Pictorial Culture
By the 18th century, the increased prosperity of Edo’s urban and provincial merchant classes meant that ownership of paintings was no longer limited to the aristocrats and warriors who officially occupied the elite strata of society. These new audiences both demanded and responded to an enormous range of pictorial production, from realistic polychrome birds and flowers to monochrome ink landscapes, from monumental screen paintings to the most intimate of albums. Within this highly competitive environment, Kyoto painter Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795) synthesized traditional subject matter with scientifically accurate observation of nature and played with the conventions of both European and Chinese image-making. The novelty and accessibility of his work contributed to his immense success. His many followers, whose works found their way into numerous collections, are today often collectively referred to as the Maruyama-Shijō school after the vicinity where they worked.