View of West Lake
Kusumi Morikage Japanese
Not on view
Several major Chan (Japanese: Zen) temples and other places with cultural and historical associations were located on West Lake, on the outskirts of China's Southern Song capital of Hangzhou. Even after the decline of the Song dynasty, the area around the lake remained a symbol of great cultural achievement. On this set of screens, West Lake appears in panorama, as if seen from an observation tower on the city wall along the bottom edge. Ten views of well-known sites in different seasons are distributed within the sweeping view. Kusumi Morikage, a disciple of Kano Tan’yū (1602–1672), official painter to the shogunate, is said to have left the Kano school for unknown reasons. This pair of screens is not dated, but its mild, clear features suggest that Morikage painted it early in his career, before developing his more idiosyncratic style.
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