Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection—Part One

By 1800, Edo (present-day Tokyo) was already the largest city in the world, with more than a million inhabitants. It was established in 1603 as the eastern headquarters of the Tokugawa military government (shogunate) following the house’s victory over rival warlords. While the figurehead emperor remained in the historical capital of Kyoto to the west, Edo became the seat from which the shoguns ruled. Known as the Edo period (1615–1868), Japan’s early modern era brought an extraordinary wave of urbanization and innovation to the archipelago. This in turn stimulated an immense appetite for intellectual and, especially, pictorial culture, and a dizzying array of painting studios was established to satisfy demand. Although painters did not fit neatly into Edo’s strict class system, which divided the citizenry into warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants, they adopted a version of the warrior elite’s concept of allegiance to a house or “lineage.” Painters of lineages old and new produced a rich variety of visually alluring works, many of which share an interest in convergence: the classical tangles with the contemporary, high meets low, domestic plays against international. Painting Edo is organized to reflect Edo period conceptions of lineage, offering a view of how “Edo” was articulated by and for its own creators and consumers. These compelling images continue to shape our impressions of Japan today. The paintings in this exhibition are drawn exclusively from the remarkable collection of Robert S. Feinberg (Harvard class of 1961) and Betsy G. Feinberg. In an act of exceptional generosity, the Feinbergs have promised their collection of more than three hundred works to the Harvard Art Museums. 

This first gallery provides an introduction to the major painting lineages explored in subsequent galleries. 

The Kano house, by virtue of its association with the ruling class, was the premier painting lineage of early modern Japan. The movement of political power from Kyoto to Edo in the early 17th century fostered the growth of new Kano studios in the east of the country. As socially elite “painters-in-attendance” to the shoguns and regional overlords, Kano painters provided monumental paintings in a palette of rich mineral colors on gold. This official repertoire was dominated by historical Chinese themes rather than domestic Japanese imagery. Compositions and painting techniques were passed down from master to pupil within a carefully regulated studio structure using closely guarded copybooks. In this way, Kano painters maintained their supremacy until the mid-18th century, when increasing numbers of unaffiliated painters began to emerge.

Virtually all aspects of life in Edo Japan, from place of residence and occupation to clothing and hairstyles, were tightly regulated by the warrior class, who ranked above farmers, artisans, and merchants within a strict status system. However, in the theater districts and licensed pleasure quarters of the Yoshiwara (in Edo) and Shimabara (in Kyoto), class restrictions could be temporarily loosened while urban pleasure-seekers indulged in expensive entertainment offered by cultivated courtesans or watched the latest stars of the Kabuki stage. Dubbed “floating worlds” (ukiyo)—a play on a Buddhist term that describes the fleeting, illusory nature of human life—these cities-within-cities and their inhabitants became the focus of a new type of contemporary genre painting (ukiyo-e). Patrons with the means to acquire a souvenir of an actual visit, as well as those who hoped to experience it for themselves one day, purchased vibrant images of the most fashionably dressed courtesans and celebrated actors of the day as buoyant touchstones for their fantasies.

Literati painting originated in China and Korea in the 11th century, when scholar-officials took up an amateur style to depict mountain landscapes, symbolic plants, and other touchstone images with the modest materials of paper and ink. Deliberately under-crafted and antithetical in every way to the highly finished products of professional painters, works in this mode reveal the hand of the painter and were ostensibly created as gifts rather than for monetary gain. They expressed a shared set of values based on naturalness, lack of pretension, and self-cultivation. Upon gaining a foothold in Kyoto during the early 18th century, literati painting had an enormous impact on Edo period visual culture. Limited access to original Chinese paintings and the absence of a true equivalent to China’s scholar-official class meant that printed painting manuals had an outsize influence on the domestication of this continental mode of picture-making. Although literati painting had in fact been professionalized in China early on, in Japan the tradition was embraced from the outset more as a pictorial style than as a manifestation of personal cultivation.

“Rinpa” is the word most often used today to describe a mode of painting distinctive for its engagement with classical Japanese painting and literature, the generous use of precious mineral pigments and metals, and graphic qualities that made it highly adaptable to ceramics, lacquer, and textiles. In the Edo period, however, it was known as Kōrin-ha, or School of Kōrin, for its supposed progenitor, Kyoto-born Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716). Yet School of Kōrin painters were not part of an official Kano-style academy. Instead, most affiliated themselves by respectfully copying historical masters whom they had never met. Embedded within their visually striking works is an enriching art historical self-consciousness expressed through the creative repetition of hallmark motifs and techniques.

Alongside the agricultural innovation and urbanization of the Edo period came economic growth. By the late 18th century, ownership and appreciation of paintings had spread to almost all classes of Tokugawa society, from aristocrats and samurai to merchants. This expansion of the consumer base led to intense competition among painting studios, from which the Kyoto painter Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795) emerged preeminent. Ōkyo infused familiar painting subjects with new life through his gauzy, realistic style, informed by study of the natural world and by both Chinese and Western pictorialism. His many students went on to establish successful ateliers in the Shijō (Fourth Avenue) area of Kyoto, resulting in the umbrella term “Maruyama-Shijō” for this visually appealing mode of painting.

Part Two of this four-part online exhibition visits the “Floating Worlds” of Edo’s licensed pleasure quarters, and explores the graphically rich paintings of the School of Kōrin. Follow the link on the next slide.