Bamboo and Fences

A six-panel folding screen by Tosa Mitsuoki, one of a pair, depicting bamboo growing through and beside a low wooden fence. The composition shifts away from the gold-ground polychrome painting for which Mitsuoki is most celebrated toward a more restrained ink-painting mode of light colour on paper, a register the Tosa school maintained in parallel with its decorative practice. Bamboo had entered Japanese painting from the Chinese tradition - where it was one of the canonical Four Gentleman subjects of literati ink painting - and was absorbed into yamato-e as a native motif over the medieval period. The motif of bamboo combined with a fence (kaki) had Heian poetic associations, the bamboo's segmented stalks and the wooden uprights of the fence both supplying vertical rhythms that ink painters used to structure horizontal compositions. The screen belongs to the period of Mitsuoki's leadership of the Tosa school after 1654 and is held by the Art Institute of Chicago, dated by the museum to 1654-1681. The use of ink and light colour on paper - rather than the colour-and-gold on silk format of his more elaborate decorative screens - places this work in a more contemplative chamber of the Tosa workshop's production, intended for spaces and audiences less elaborate than those served by the gold-ground court screens.