Artworks

Winter Landscape

Artwork · Sesshū Tōyō · 1470s · kakemono · Tokyo National Museum

Probably from a set of the four seasons by Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506): Southern Song motifs turned into an original Japanese statement. The eye follows a man in a wide-brimmed hat up a stepped path to a temple, past firm, dark strokes of rocks and trees; a cliff rises, its outline lost at the top as if the mountain had disappeared in snow and mist — not an eternal landscape but a moment. Sesshū, trained at Shōkokuji, left Kyoto for Yamaguchi in 1464 and travelled in Ming China in 1467–1469. 1 Mason 2005, p. 226, fig. 260. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.