Landscape

The Kano lineage of painters was among Japan’s most long-lived schools, remaining a conservative force in Japanese painting for some four hundred years. Their monochrome ink landscapes, ultimately modeled on the misty, idealized Chinese Southern Song painting tradition, remained popular among aristocratic and temple patrons for large-scale screens, as well as more intimate works, such as the scroll, made for private quarters.Kano Tsunenobu, nephew of the pivotal early Edo-period master Kano Tanyu, followed the traditional formula in his compositional approach by confining the dense landscape elements into one corner of the painting, and counterbalancing these with seemingly unending watery and misty expanses. Tsunenobu’s employment of wet ink outlines, axe-cut textural strokes, and delicate color washes characterized the lyrical Kano style. (“Tradition, Transmission, and Transformation in East Asian Art,” curated by Cornell PhD student Yuhua Ding under the supervision of Ellen Avril and presented at the Johnson Museum January 23-June 12, 2016)