T
he Japanese art from the Okada Museum collection stands as an ode to the country’s greatest masters of painting and craftsmanship. Representing some of the highest expressions of skill and imagination from Japan’s early modern period, these works encompass both the monumental and the intimate – from the grand compositions once destined for the mansion residences of daimyo, to the refined and poetic creations of the potter-painters of Hizen and Kyoto. Together they reveal the breadth and subtlety of Japan’s aesthetic vision. Whether brushed on silk, unfolded across gilded screens, or rendered in the translucent glazes of porcelain, each work speaks to a culture where beauty and a reverence for nature are inseparable.
Through these works, a vivid narrative of early modern Japan unfolds. Kano Motonobu’s Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons, a rare pair of screens the likes of which are almost never seen outside museum collections, captures the sensibility of the late Muromachi period. The splendour of the Momoyama period is perhaps best exemplified by the unusual form of an Oribe hand basket painted with highly abstract roundel motifs, and the dramatic composition of Bridge and Willow Trees. The Rimpa school of the early Edo period – founded by Tawaraya Sotatsu and reimagined by Ogata Korin and his brother Kenzan – is represented here in works of exceptional elegance: an important fragment from a handscroll, known colloquially as Kaki ni cho [Butterflies among Flowers and Foliage], with poems from the Shin kokin wakashu inscribed by the hand of Hon’ami Koetsu, and decorated in gold and silver printed underpaintings attributed to Sotatsu, depicts swallowtail butterflies in flight above grasses, wisteria, ivy and pine-graced hilltops. A magnificent pair of six-panel folding screens with chrysanthemums and frost by Korin recalls one of Japan’s most famous poems from the Hyakunin isshu – “…for I cannot distinguish white chrysanthemums from the first frost”. Kenzan’s Kyo ware, with its bold brushwork and almost textile-like design, exemplifies the Japanese delight in surface decoration (kazari), as well as innovation within tradition.
Among the collection’s treasures is one of the most important paintings by Kitagawa Utamaro, Fukagawa in Snow – a panoramic masterpiece of ukiyo-e. Painted in an array of luxurious pigments on joined sheets of imported xuan paper and spanning over three metres, the work passed through the collection of the great Japoniste Siegfried Bing and was long thought lost after it was last exhibited in Japan in 1952. Its rediscovery after nearly seventy years restored to view one of the grandest achievements of ukiyo-e painting, long celebrated through its companion pieces held in American museums.
The collection’s spirit of synthesis, invention and profound reverence for the natural world finds its culmination in the strikingly modern vision of Katsushika Hokusai. His woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji remains among the most celebrated and iconic works of art across the globe: its three masterpieces – The Great Wave, Red Fuji and Black Fuji – are all represented here in the collection. Yet Hokusai’s genius extends far beyond printmaking. His painting A Summer Morning transforms a simple domestic act into a meditation on beauty and the seasons: a woman at her mirror, her surroundings implied only through the delicate arrangement of everyday objects – a man’s kimono on the rack, a blue and white bowl of morning glories, a vessel of goldfish – form a visual poem on the rhythms of daily life. A Standing Courtesan, once owned by Edmond de Goncourt, one of Japan’s earliest Western admirers, testifies to the enduring dialogue between Japan and the outer world since the late nineteenth century.
The Japanese works from the Okada Museum collection illustrate not only an evolution of aesthetic ideals over the course of centuries, but a continual running thread – namely a pursuit to seek poetry in the natural world, and a distillation of its essential elements to profound and poignant effect. Through its history of Japanese painting, a unique poetic sensibility emerges that transcends both time and place, enriching the viewer today as it had done so in the past.
