Artworks

Reading in the Bamboo Study

Artwork · Tenshō Shūbun · c. 1446 · kakemono · Tokyo National Museum

One of the few paintings accepted as by Tenshō Shūbun (d. c. 1460), monk and administrator of Shōkokuji, who went to Korea in 1423 for a printed Buddhist canon: a shigajiku with a long introduction and five inscriptions. A scholar’s thatched study is almost hidden in a bamboo grove beneath a sharp bluff with two pines; an old man and his attendant cross a bridge to visit him; boats and a temple’s roofs lie in the distance. Shūbun has solved the problem of believable recession; his motifs come from the Southern Song painter Xia Gui. 1 Mason 2005, pp. 225–226, fig. 259. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.