context: painting > great schools

Hasegawa Tohaku, 1539-1610

a magnificent screen of pines, by Hasegawa Tohaku, c.1600

Frankly, it's pushing it claiming that I'm discussing a school here - he did found one, people did study under him, and people talk about a Hasegawa school; but on the other hand I've not actually found an artist of his school that I have any interest in at all, but I do want to talk about him.

He started in the Kano school, but his interest in Sesshu and the Chinese southern Song style left him too unsettled to stick with them. I've not seen anything to suggest that he saw himself as a Zen artist of any kind, but the space in his best works is surely found nowhere else but in Zen painting. His moods also seemed to catch the rising popularity of the Way of Tea, and fit in very well with that. The extraordinarily sparse and austere simplicity of the pines screen shown here, mostly white space, is surely a good match to the rustic ceramics popularised by Rikyu.

But besides all that, I really love...

Hasegawa Tohaku's monkeys