Taira no Tsunemasa Playing the Biwa at Tsukubusuma Shrine

This two-panel folding screen depicts a scene from the classic fourteenth-century war epic The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari), in which the twelfth-century warrior Taira no Tsunemasa goes on a pilgrimage to the island of Chikubushima in Lake Biwa and plays the
biwa (short-necked, fretted lute) for the kami (local deity). Tsunemasa was a nephew of the late Heian period (794–1185) general Taira no Kiyomori and a master of the biwa. Traveling from Kyoto to join the punitive force against the Minamoto army in eastern Japan, he stopped at the Tsukubusuma Shrine on the island and sat down to play the biwa as a form of offering. The kami of Chikubushima was so deeply impressed that he appeared to Tsunemasa in the form of a white dragon.

Here, against a now oxidized silver ground, Tsunemasa sitsplaying his instrument at the edge of a lake with cresting waves. A gold moon and white dragon float above him. The rocks are rendered in the loose, modulated ink outlines and the tarashikomi (“dripping in,” or mottled pigmentation) technique characteristic of Rinpa, while its decorative quality comes through in the use of silver for the background and gold pigment for the moon.