SESSON SHŪKEI (CIRCA 1492-1577)
Dragon in Clouds
Muromachi period (1333-1573), mid-16th century
A hanging scroll, ink and slight colors on paper, depicting a dragon in clouds, square intaglio seal Sesson
14 5/8 x 22 5/8in (37.2 x 57.5cm)
Footnotes:
Provenance
Takashi Yanagi, Kyoto
Published
Nakamura Tanio, 'Saikin hakken no Sesson ga 'Unryū zu' to 'Take ni hato zu' (Recently Discovered Paintings by Sesson: 'Dragon and Clouds' and 'Dove on a Bamboo Branch'),' Kobijutsu 86 (April 1988), pp.113-119 (p.114, color plate and fig. 2)

The present lot is one of two scrolls first identified as works by the important late-medieval Zen painter Sesson Shūkei in an article (see above) by Nakamura Tanio, a senior curator who organized exhibitions on Sesshū (1956) and Sesson (1974) at Tokyo National Museum and published widely on Muromachi-period ink painting.1 Nakamura assigned the present lot to Sesson's mature period, drawing favorable parallels between the dragon depicted here and another in one of Sesson's most famous works, a pair of screens of a dragon and a tiger in the Cleveland Museum of Art (formerly in the Satomi and Mitsui collections), painted circa 1546-1556, noting that the artist here succeeded in conveying the celestial creature's majesty on a much smaller scale, aided by the addition of a very slight touch of red pigment to the mouth. Nakamura also praises the abbreviated treatment of the clouds and the skill with which the contrast between an overall pale wash and darker areas of ink serves to enhance the effect of the dragon's surging power.2

The square intaglio seal, thought to have been used between the years 1546 and 1556, is also seen on a painting of a sailboat in a storm (Fūtōzu) in the Nomura Art Museum, Kyoto, registered as an Important Cultural Property in 1941 (#00703) and a painting of Qin Gao (Kinkō) Riding a Carp in Kyoto National Museum; in both cases the seal appears to be in a more advanced state of wear than on the present lot.3

1. 'Nakamura Tanio,' obituary notice, Tokyo Research Institute for Cultural Properties, December 10, 2021, tobunken.go.jp/materials/bukko/28218.html.
2. For the Cleveland screens, see clevelandart.org/art/1959.136.1 and Frank Feltens and Yukio Lippit eds., Sesson Shūkei: A Zen Monk-Painter in Medieval Japan, Washington, D.C., Freer Gallery of Art, 2021, cat. no. 10.
3. For a good image of the Nomura Art Museum painting and its seal, see wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paysage_sous_la_tempête_par_le_peintre_japonais_Sesson_Shukei_(1504-après_1589).jpg; for the Kyoto National Museum painting, with a detail of its signature and seal, see Feltens and Lippitt (cited above), fig. 27 (p. 149) and for the dating 1546-1556, see cat. no. 14, pp. 192-193; Nakamura (p. 117, fig. 6) publishes the same signature and seal but misassociates it with a hawk-and-landscape screen in Tokyo National Museum.