Artworks

Screens painted with fans

Artwork · Tawara Sōtatsu · c. 1630 · byōbu · Museum of the Imperial Collections

A pair of eight-panel screens on which forty-eight fans by Tawara Sōtatsu are pasted — his shop, the Tawaraya, was known for fans with themes from classical literature. One shows an episode of the Tales of Ise (Ariwara no Narihira): a nobleman and the girl he has carried off shelter from a storm in a ruined storehouse, she inside, he guarding the door; at dawn she is gone, eaten by a demon, who climbs through the air above the roof — the twin of the God of Thunder of the Kitano Tenjin engi. 1 Mason 2005, pp. 268–269, fig. 310. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.