Plantain and Bird in Snow

On this fan-shaped painting by Kano Sōshū, younger brother of the third-generation head of the Kano School, Kano Eitoku (1543–1590), a bird perches on the leafless branch of an old tree above a stream next to a tangle of Chinese lantern plants, reeds, and a plantain, its broad leaves laden with heavy, early winter snow. With the exception of the ink-lines of the flowing stream and a small number of the leaves of the Chinese lantern, most of the motifs are painted on top of a layer of shell-white pigment (gofun), itself applied directly to the paper of the fan. Some loss of the gofun have revealed Sōshū’s bold underdrawing of the plantain’s leaves, swiftly outlined for the benefit of another member of his studio who would have applied the gold leaf around primary motifs, which were left in reserve, before returning the fan to Sōshū to complete the painting. Despite these losses, Sōshū’s masterful description of the leaves’ veins and discolored edges is apparent in those parts of the leaves that were not painted on top of gofun and have thus survived mostly intact.

The production of painted folding fans constituted a significant part of the Kano School’s output in the sixteenth century. Whether painted in colorful pigments and gold or rendered in ink monochrome, many were affixed bamboo ribs and actually used. This fan, however, was never mounted as a fan. It originally belonged to a set of sixty fan-shaped paintings by Sōshū that were mounted in a pair of albums that later entered the collection of the Date family, a former samurai clan and noble family. All the fans in the set were affixed with the same two artist seals seen in the present example. In the years following the fans’ first publication in 1954, they were divided into a single album of 49 paintings and a number of hanging scrolls, including the present example.