Artworks

Deer Scroll

Artwork · Tawara Sōtatsu, Honami Kōetsu · c. 1615 · handscroll · Seattle Art Museum

One of the last collaborations of Honami Kōetsu and Tawara Sōtatsu: deer running, standing and feeding in gold and silver, with twenty-eight poems from the Shin kokinshū. Two hands can be seen in the paintings, one skilled in gold, the other adding single deer in heavier strokes; perhaps Sōtatsu painted it and Kōetsu, not entirely pleased, filled the voids. In 1615 Tokugawa Ieyasu granted Kōetsu land at Takagamine north-west of Kyoto, where an artists’ community grew from which the Rinpa school would come. 1 Mason 2005, p. 268, fig. 309. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.