Old plum tree | Kanō Eigaku 狩野 永岳 | 1790-1867

Kanō Eigaku is the 9th head of the Kanō workshop in Kyoto. Since the huge city of Edo (Tokyo) was the cultural and political center of Japan at the end of the Edo period (1603-1867), the workshop of the Kanō institution in the Old Imperial City had to take care of a profile with which it could compete with the capital.

Kanō Eigaku was an accomplished painter who had studied all contemporary styles and was able to incorporate them into his art. He is famous for his paintings in the Imperial Katsura Villa. In his artistic practice, he placed the main emphasis on the glorious ink painting of the 15th/16th century, which had flourished in Kyoto and remained the basis of all important painters in the centuries to come. This picture could also have been painted 300 years earlier.

Out of nowhere, a fibrous brushstroke with watery ink protrudes diagonally into the picture (it was painted as a smear, of course). We know this quality of stroke from the Zen-inspired instant paintings and calligraphy of Sesshu and his contemporaries. From this "wipe structure", Eigaku then uses much smaller movements to develop a gnarled, quite realistic-looking tree trunk of a blossoming plum tree. Even on the thinner branches, his stroke remains loose and flexible, and so there is no stiff or schematic zone in the entire picture - the entire brushwork breathes, as we admire in the masterpieces of the 14th to 16th centuries.

As a personality of Kyoto, he loved to give himself a rather awkward name. His signature, which in its quirkiness fits wonderfully with the line of the gnarled plum tree, is quite long. He used at least 35 stamps, each of which bears a name. Such floridities are typical of the old-fashioned Kyoto culture of the time.