Bamboo Grove

A grove of bamboo, rendered in a range of rich green tones, flanks a garden pond that stretches across and connects the two six-panel folding screens. Brilliant golden clouds contribute to the atmosphere of fantasy and lushness. Bamboo in East Asian visual culture is a symbol of resilience against adversity and strength during times of crisis. Yet here, the bamboo sprouts and young bamboo shoots amid the thick, mature stalks also suggest a message of rejuvenation and prosperity.

This spectacular set of screens employs expensive, thickly applied malachite green, azurite blue, and other mineral pigments against a mélange of gold leaf and cut-gold clouds. Both the raised forms of the brushwood fence, conveyed by relief modeling of gesso (moriage) covered in gold leaf, and the use of scattered cut-gold clouds, are trademarks of deluxe screen commissions of the late sixteenth through eighteenth centuries created by Kano family ateliers. In this dynamic composition, the artist has followed the well-established convention of cropping both the top and bottom of some of the bamboo to create the impression of a “close-up” view of the grove.

When compared to the complex bird-and-flower screen paintings of the Kano studio of a generation earlier, it reveals a tendency towards compositional simplification to achieve a more vivid visual impact. It relates very closely to sliding-door panel paintings (fusuma-e) made for castles, palatial samurai residences, and temples erected in early and mid-seventeenth century. For instance, fusuma-e created by Jinnojō and other artists of the Kano atelier in the early seventeenth century for the Ninomaru Palace in the precinct of Nijō Castle in central Kyoto also feature tigers, animals frequently associated with bamboo. Ninnaji Temple has similar fusuma-e created by the Kano workshop under the supervision of Tan’yū (1602–1672). Such bamboo screens continued to be produced into the eighteenth century, as well as in nineteenth-century Kano revival works, but such later manifestations of the subject lack the overall visual impact of seventeenth-century examples, and the use of relief molding with gesso and more elaborate forms of gold-leaf decoration are absent.

The work is unsigned and unsealed, which was frequently the case with large-scale Kano school screen and sliding-door panel painting commissions.