Wakan Meigaen (A Garden of Celebrated Japanese and Chinese Paintings)

Wakan Meigaen (和漢名画苑, "A Garden of Celebrated Japanese and Chinese Paintings") is the most ambitious of Ōoka Shunboku's printed painting manuals, a six-volume survey of the East Asian painting tradition issued in Osaka around the middle of the eighteenth century. The Art Institute of Chicago copy (accession 2022.820, Frederick W. Gookin Collection) is catalogued under a broad seventeenth-eighteenth-century date but corresponds to the edition Shunboku produced for the Osaka publisher Bunkidō; a related Metropolitan Museum of Art copy bears the date 1750. The book's organizing premise is encyclopedic: each page reproduces, in woodblock line-cut, the brush style of an individual master — Chinese painters of the Tang, Song, and Yuan, then Japanese painters from Sesshū and the early Kano line through the seventeenth century. As a Kano-trained Osaka painter, Shunboku was in a strong position to attempt this kind of stylistic survey; his book brought painting models that had previously circulated only in elite workshop sketchbooks to a much broader audience of provincial painters and craftsmen. The Chicago copy preserves the small hanshibon page size (about 26.8 by 17.9 centimeters) typical of the ehon trade and documents the publication that, more than any other single work, established Shunboku's reputation as a popularizer of the Kano tradition.