ANONYMOUS
Moon Over Mount Yoshino
Edo period (1615-1868), late 17th/early 18th century
A six-panel folding screen (originally one of a pair; now six separate panels); ink, colors, and gold on paper, mounted on a wood lattice within a lacquered wood frame, depicting the moon above rounded hills with mist and clouds in the foreground
59 7/16 × 119 13/16in (150.9 × 304.4cm)
Footnotes:
Provenance:
Gift of the Estate of Mrs. Edward Robinson (1858-1952), 1952
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1952-present

This imposing composition belongs within a Japanese pictorial tradition that may be traced back to the Sun and Moon with Landscapes of the Four Seasons (circa 1500), a famous screen pair promoted to National Treasure status in 2018 and preserved in the Kongōji Temple, Kawachi Nagano, Osaka Prefecture. While the Kongōji screens include a wealth of seasonal detail, among their most distinctive and memorable features are a gold sun and a silver moon, placed between mountain peaks on the right-hand and left-hand screens respectively.1

The present lot, the left-hand element of a former screen pair, reflects a simplified approach to landscape painting that had developed during the seventeenth century under the leadership of such masters as Tawaraya Sōtatsu (1570-c.1640) and Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716), founders of the painting style that would later be known as Rinpa.

The rounded hills of Mount Yoshino in Nara Prefecture, distinguishable here by rounded, simple forms that are scarcely exaggerated from their actual appearance, had been an elite tourist site since early times on account of their luxuriant spring cherry blossom. Dispensing even with that detail (as seen in a famous pair of screens by Watanabe Shikō (1683-1755)2 the anonymous artist here presents the hills as almost abstract land masses, executed in mineral green pigment that contrasts with brilliant gold and darkened, oxidized silver.

1. For an accessible account of the background to this painting subject, see Michele Bambling, 'The Kongō-ji Screens: Illuminating the Tradition of Yamato-e 'Sun and Moon' Screens,' Orientations, 27/8 (September 1996), pp. 70-82.

2. For the Watanabe Shikō screens, see William Watson ed., The Great Japan Exhibition: Art of the Edo Period 1600-1868, (exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 24 October 1981-21 February 1982); London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981), cat. no. 34 and cover.

For a similar work from the Momoyama period (1573-1615) in the collection of the The Museum Chōkokan, Nabeshima, Saga, Saga Prefecture see bunka.nii.ac.jp/heritages/detail/149304.
This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: ¤
¤ Without reserve