Japanese art - Japanese art - Tokugawa, or Edo, period: At the death of the Momoyama leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1598, his five-year-old son, Hideyori, inherited nominal rule, but true power was held by Hideyoshi’s counselors, among whom Tokugawa Ieyasu was the most prominent. Japan’s early modern period of urbanization and intellectual cultivation was a period of relative peace and prosperity, which led, in turn, to the rich and vibrant art world that illustrated a culture’s song of itself.You will have seen art from the Edo Period—its most recognizable images are the Yet these small-scale, delicate, disposable prints comprise only a fraction of the art from the period and what is on offer at “Painting Edo,” which speaks to the scale and scope of this exhibition. An important trend in the Edo period was the rise of the bunjinga genre, a kind of literati painting, also known as the Nanga School or Southern Painting school. Edo—named for the capital city of Edo (now Tokyo), which was, by 1800, the largest city in the world—was both a place and a time, as the exhibition’s co-curator, Rachel Saunders, says.

Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Robert S. and Betsy G. Feinberg, 2017.225.1–2.

Judiciously assembled over more than four decades, the collection offers an exceptional opportunity to explore continuities and disruptions in artistic practice in early modern Japan. Mineral pigments painted on gold leaf with a silk brocade border. These almost endlessly unfurling galleries might feel daunting if the objects and their presentation didn’t create such intimacy, the ample wall space and generous cases allowing scrolls and screens to fully display exquisite details that invite you to stay close.It’s a meditative pleasure—appropriate, given their Buddhist origins—to get lost in these details. Because to fully understand the significance of the Edo Period in Japan, which lasted from around 1600 to 1868, is to place yourself in a country that flourished even as it was closed off to the rest of the world. This genre started as an imitation of Chinese scholar-amateur painters of the Yuan Dynasty, whose works …

Over the past 30 years, TFAM has collected a wide variety of Japanese art, a collection that includes a large number of paintings from the early modern period (Edo period). Painting Edo explores how the period, and the city, articulated itself by showcasing paintings in all the major formats—including hanging scrolls, folding screens, sliding doors, fan paintings, and woodblock-printed books—from virtually every stylistic lineage of the era, to tell a comprehensive story of Edo painting on its own terms. A Organized by the Harvard Art Museums.

Maruyama Ōkyo, Peacock and Peonies, Japanese, Edo period, 1768.

Robert and Betsy Feinberg have generously promised their collection of over three hundred works of Japanese art to the Harvard Art Museums.

This fascination was given an additional technological boost as Edo progressed, and the development of the microscope enabled a much deeper, even surreal visual intricacy in the wings of a beetle, the barbs of a peacock feather.

Among these was another late-Edo-period master of landscape art, Andō Hiroshige (1797–1858). One example of that diversity is the art of the floating world, a school inspired by the period’s rapid urbanization as thousands of residents from the country moved to the shogunate capital, Edo, transforming what was a traditional fishing village in the 1600s to the most populous city in …

“Painting Edo” offers a window onto the supremely rich visual culture of Japan’s early modern era and explores how the Edo period (1615–1868), and the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo), expressed itself during a time of artistic efflorescence. Spanning all four of its galleries, this is the largest-ever exhibition staged by the Harvard Art Museums. Certainly, during the early Edo period, many of the previous trends in painting continued to be popular; however, a number of new trends also emerged. The arts of the period flourished, reflecting and inflecting these fertile conditions. Promised gift of Robert S. and Betsy G. Feinberg, TL42147.17. Materials. Category Early 19th Century Japanese Antique Edo Paintings and Screens. Dutch traders sneaked European plates into Edo, and the integration of depth of field, perspectival nuance—represented by a lower horizon line—and human anatomy championed by Western art since the Renaissance, is recognizably layered into Japanese painting as it evolved throughout the Edo Period.