Landscape of the Four Seasons

The luxuriant foliage of spring and summer is depicted on the right in this pair of screens by Unkoku Tōgan (1547–1618). A land mass supports pavilions and a tall cliff, which rises above a promontory extending into the center of the screen. The scene is a busy one, with figures seen outdoors, in a pavilion, and inside houses. Boats are moored offshore, and in the distance a flock of geese fans out over a range of low-lying hills. The hills continue onto the screen at the left where, silhouetted against a dark sky they appear covered with snow. To the left, pictorial elements are brought up close to the viewer. A huge land mass dominates the scene. Nestled in the hills below is an uninhabited village, connected to the outside world by a narrow path in the foreground and a bridge at the extreme left. Four figures are visible in this otherwise desolate landscape: at the right a traveler riding a donkey and accompanied by a servant; in the center a fisherman seated cross-legged in his boat; and at the left a figure crossing the bridge.

The flight of geese and the moon on the screen at the right recall two scenes from the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers (cat. nos. 64, 77), a Chinese subject that by the late Muromachi period had become extremely popular among Japanese landscape painters.

Unkoku Tōgan impressed two of his seals on each of the screens. One of the major painters of the Momoyama period, Tōgan was also the founder of the Unkoku school, which thrived—particularly in western Japan—into the Meiji period. Before adopting his artistic name, Tōgan was known as Hara Naoharu. He may have been born into a branch of the Hara warrior clan, based in Hizen Province (Saga Prefecture), in northern Kyūshū. Tradition has it that his father, the head of the clan, was killed in battle in 1584 and that the family subsequently dispersed.[1] Naoharu seems to have gained the patronage of Lord Mōri of Hiroshima, the wealthiest and most powerful daimyo in western Japan. No work produced by Naoharu before 1592 has been identified; we know, however, that an important commission received in 1593 ensured his prominence as an ink painter. In that year Lord Mōri, the current owner of the famous Long Scroll by Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506), asked the still unknown Naoharu to make a copy.[2] Upon the successful completion of the commission, Lord Mōri gave Naoharu the use of Sesshū's studio, Unkokuan (Studio of Clouds in the Valley). Naoharu then rook the artistic name "Tōgan"—which uses the first character of "Tōyō"—and adopted "Unkoku" as his new family name.

The paintings by Tōgan that are strongly influenced by the work of Sesshū are customarily dated to after 1593, though he was probably acquainted with Sesshū's work before this date and may even have met some of his students. After he inherited Sesshū's studio, Tōgan's paintings became rather conservative. Nevertheless, he found ample patronage for his work in western Japan and in Kyoto. His screen paintings have been preserved in large numbers, many of them at subtemples of Daitokuji. These works represent Tōgan's excursions into the realm of monumental painting of the Momoyama period, including screens with gilded backgrounds. One pair attributed to him and now in the MOA Museum of Art, Atami, features genre scenes of cherry-blossom viewing and falconry, reflecting the wide range of his subjects and styles.[3]

Because so few of Tōgan's works are firmly dated, it has been difficult to establish a chronology for his paintings. In the 1980s, however, Yamamoto Hideo made an extended study of Tōgan's seal impressions.[4] He concluded that the artist most frequently used the square "Tōgan" seal in combination with a round seal reading "Unkoku." The lower part of the "Tōgan" seal seems to have been damaged sometime between August 1604 and February 1611.[5] The artist later used a gourd-shaped "Unkoku" seal together with the damaged "Tōgan" seal. Thus the Burke screens, impressed with the round "Unkoku" seal and the undamaged "Tōgan" seal, may be safely assigned a date after 1593 but before 1611.

The ink landscape chat extends across the Burke screens recalls many of Sesshū's works, including the Long Scroll, not only in the sharp, heavy outlines but in the shapes of the rocks, houses, figures, and boats, and in the precise, architectonic structuring of the landscape elements.[6] In one respect, however, it makes a significant departure. Most of the paired screen paintings traditionally attributed to Sesshū adhere to a compositional scheme used throughout the Muromachi period and perpetuated by Kano-school masters into the Momoyama era. In this scheme, pictorial elements are crowded into the outermost sides of paired screens, while the area where the screens meet is left relatively unfilled, creating a sense of open space and suggesting recession into distance. In the Burke screens, however, Tōgan breaks with this tradition. In the right screen part of the land mass on the right has floated toward the center to form a promontory; and the outcropping of hills and mountains that overwhelms the left screen is connected precariously to the screen's left border by only a small bridge. A generous space is created at that juncture, allowing a view into the far distance, in contrast to the Muromachi scheme, in which this area is filled with close-up landscape elements. One screen attributed to Sesshū, in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., however, makes the same daring departure from the Muromachi formula, so it is difficult to attribute this innovation to Tōgan himself.[7] It should also be noted that Tōgan experimented with this new type of composition only during the early part of his career, while his "Tōgan" seal was still intact. After the seal was damaged, he apparently abandoned the new approach, and it was never taken up by his artistic heirs. The Burke screens thus testify to the achievements of the early, experimental stage of Tōgan's career.

[Miyeko Murase 2000, Bridge of Dreams]

[1] Naoharu's name does not, however, appear in genealogical documents of the Hara family. See Kageyama Sumio 1984, p. 162.
[2] Both Sesshū's original and Naoharu's copy are in the Hōfu Mōri Hōkōkai, Yamaguchi Prefecture, which was founded by Mōri's descendants. See Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art 1984, p. 180, for Tōgan's explanatory colophon on Sesshū's scroll.
[3] Kawai Masatomo 1978, pl. 41.
[4] Yamamoto Hideo 1988, pp. 148–65.
[5] Ibid., p. 151.
[6] Tanaka lchimatsu and Nakamura Tanio 1973, pp. 20–29, 103–9.
[7] Ibid., pp. 94–95.

Signature: Seals: Unkoku and Tōgan (on both screens)

Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation , New York (until 2015; donated to MMA)

New York. Asia House Gallery. "Byōbu: Japanese Screens from New York Collections," January 14, 1971–March 14, 1971.

New Haven. Yale University Art Gallery. "Bright Color, Bold Ink: Diversity in Momoyama Art," February 23, 1988–April 4, 1988.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Japanese Ink Paintings from the Collection of Mary and Jackson Burke," February 15–June 25, 1989.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Masterpieces of Japanese Art from The Mary Griggs Burke Collection," March 30–June 25, 2000.

Murase, Miyeko, Il Kim, Shi-yee Liu, Gratia Williams Nakahashi, Stephanie Wada, Soyoung Lee, and David Sensabaugh. Art Through a Lifetime: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection. Vol. 1, Japanese Paintings, Printed Works, Calligraphy. [New York]: Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, [2013], p. 111, cat. no. 141.