Book of Famous Japanese and Chinese Paintings

Book of Famous Japanese and Chinese Paintings is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's holding (accession JIB161) of a 1720 Ōoka Shunboku ehon — an early printing of the title now usually catalogued as Ehon tekagami (絵本手鑑), the woodblock-printed picture book that launched his career as Osaka's foremost designer of painting manuals. The Met copy consists of twenty-five illustrated pages, five of which were originally printed in black-and-white line-block and have been hand-colored in ink and color on paper; the page size of 25.4 by 18.4 centimeters matches the standard hanshibon format of the Osaka ehon trade. Shunboku's printed picture books were designed as portable surveys of the styles of named painters — the title functions as a tekagami, or hand mirror, in which the brush manner of Sesshū, the Kano masters, Hasegawa Tōhaku, and a roster of Chinese painters could be studied in sequence — and the Met copy is one of the more visually intact early eighteenth-century survivals of that project. The hand-coloring on five pages reflects the later practice of adding color to monochrome ehon to give them the appearance of finished paintings; the underlying line-block woodcut, however, is Shunboku's original design, and the book is among the earliest fully illustrated Met holdings to document the publication that established his reputation.