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

A Garden of Celebrated Japanese and Chinese Paintings (Wakan meigaen 和漢名画苑) is a set of six woodblock-printed books published in Osaka in 1750 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2013.817a–g). The Met copy preserves the books bound as one with an additional volume, and the museum's catalogue identifies Ōoka Shunboku (大岡春卜) as the designer responsible for the reproductions inside. Wakan meigaen was the most ambitious of Shunboku's printed painting manuals: across its six volumes the book reproduces the brush style of an encyclopedic sequence of Chinese and Japanese painters, from the Tang and Song masters through Sesshū, the early Kano line, and seventeenth-century Edo academicians. The Met copy is fully illustrated in the museum's online catalogue and is part of the public domain, making it one of the most accessible Shunboku books to study at high resolution. As a published artifact it sits at the centre of his career: it is the volume that demonstrated, more comprehensively than any of his earlier ehon, the encyclopedic ambition that would secure his reputation as the eighteenth century's most influential popularizer of the Kano painting tradition.