Peacocks

The hanging scroll on the left shows a white peacock and a pomegranate tree, and the right scroll shows a male peacock next to a magnolia and red plum tree. As a symbol of opulence, the peacocks has always been a popular subject for paintings, but the peacocks in these scrolls differ from the kinds one would see in paintings from before the Edo period. The Kanō school was widely recognized as the pinnacle of the Edo art world. Everyone who was studying how to paint would first learn the style of the Kanō school, and this meant that their style became the de facto standard for much Edo-period artwork. However, as the number of artists swelled to unprecedented numbers, other styles of art also developed. In fact, the emergence of such new styles is one characteristic of Edo art. When knowledge of Chinese and western art reached Japan through traders in Nagasaki, it had an immeasurable impact on Japanese painting. A Chinese artist named Shen Nanpin also arrived in Japan in 1731, and he exerted a large influence over Japanese art. Although his dense, opulent, deeply colored images and finely wrought, detailed style were already beginning to be considered old-fashioned in China, Shen Nanpin’s style captured the hearts of Japanese artists who were dissatisfied with traditional artistic techniques. The style of his paintings spread northeast from Nagasaki and made it all the way to Edo. This painting of peacocks looks much like the kind of painting of flowers and birds that Shen Nanpin might do. Sessai, the man known as the “bunjin daimyō” (literati-artist lord) of Ise-Nagashima province, painted it toward the end of his life.