Tartars playing polo and hunting, one of a pair

In this magnificent pair of lavishly gilded folding screens, an artist of Momoyama period Japan has depicted exotic scenes from a faraway land. The painter has divided the composition into two distinct scenes. On one screen several mounted “Tatars”—nomadic peoples who once dominated northeast Asia beyond China’s northern frontier— chase a menagerie of tigers, bears, deer, and other animals in a frenzied hunt. The other screen presents Tatars on horseback playing a spirited match of polo under the watch of a canopied chieftain holding court at his yurt.

Screen paintings of Tatars manifest what has been aptly phrased a “fracture of meaning” in which Chinese literary or pictorial themes were completely transformed in Japan. The source for the Tatars screens was undoubtedly the “Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute,” a set of poems that recount the sad story of Cai Wenji, a Han dynasty Chinese woman who was kidnapped by the nomadic Xiongnu people and ransomed from her captors a dozen years later. Chinese handscrolls illustrating the “Eighteen Songs” include depictions of the nomads hunting; these probably provided the source for the displays of horsemanship featured in these and other portrayals of Tatars.

Although equestrian skills dominate most Tatars screens, vestiges of Cai Wenji’s tragic story appear in the present pair. The woman who peeks out of her tent near the seated chieftain probably represents Wenji. The children nearby may represent her half-Han children, from whom she must choose to part. Another group of figures nearby, identifiable as Han Chinese by their dress and black hats, probably depict the emissaries who have arrived to pay Wenji’s ransom.

Surviving examples and records indicate that Tatars were a popular pictorial subject in sixteenth-century Japan. The works shown here, considered the finest example of screen paintings of Tatars, have been attributed to Kano Soshu (1551–1601), head of the Kano school of painters in the 1590s. Japanese samurai encountered firsthand the people and customs of northeast Asia during feudal lord Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea in 1592, when the general Kato Kiyomasa (1561–1611) launched an attack on the Jurchens on Korea’s northeastern border. Tatars screens may commemorate Japan’s attempts at overseas conquest during this period. The Kano-school painter’s command of subtle details, rendered in self-assured brushwork, together with the screens’ fascinating mixture of literary and historical references, make them a masterpiece of Momoyama period painting.