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Painting of a Tale of Genji Scene, Tosa School

About the Item

Japanese 17th century school "Tale of Genji Scene" painting on paper, mounted to board. Nicely framed and boxed. Professor Melissa McCormick at Harvard believes that it may be the work of Tosa Mitsuyoshi (1539-1613) or one of his disciples in the Tosa School. This painting is probably a leaf taken from an album of illustrations of the Tale of Genji. Such albums would typically include one painting for each of the fifty-four chapters of the Tale. The chapters can be quite long and complex, as many as a hundred pages in modern translation, but painterly tradition dictated which scenes were considered representative of each chapter and those scenes became iconic as they were depicted over and over. Our painting is an illustration of a scene in the thirteenth chapter, also known as the Akashi Chapter. It shows the protagonist Genji going on horseback for his first meeting with a woman known as “the Akashi lady.” In the Akashi chapter, Genji’s father the Emperor has died and Genji’s older brother Suzaku, the son of their father’s primary wife, has now ascended the throne. Genji, who is notoriously promiscuous, has recently been discovered having an affair with one of Suzaku’s concubines. The resulting scandal has forced him into exile in a series of locales far away from the capital; a fate worse than death for aristocrats at the time. In the previous chapter he has spent a year on the desolate shore at Suma, near the modern city of Kobe. In the opening of the Akashi chapter, a great storm destroys Genji’s temporary residence at Suma and when the storm subsides a boat mysteriously appears ready to take him and his party a little further down the shore to the province of Akashi. Genji has previously heard rumors of the Governor of this province, a crusty old type who once served in high-ranking positions in the capital but has now come down in the world, sequestering himself in a large residence by the sea and taking the tonsure to become a priest. The old man’s great ambition is to make a good marriage for his daughter and thereby to restore the fortunes of his family at the center of power. As it happens, he is also a distant relative of Genji’s deceased mother. Various signs and omens point to the possibility that if Genji marries their daughter, known as “The Akashi Lady,” she will bear a child who will become an empress and give birth to a future emperor. This is exactly what happens in later chapters: the Akashi Lady, a woman of relatively humble birth finds herself catapulted into the highest reaches of the aristocracy, becoming the mother of an empress. The story of the rise of the Akashi family is one of the great “rags to riches” tales in classical Japanese literature. It is also the mechanism whereby the wrong that Genji’s mother suffers at the beginning of the Tale is set to right. While her son Genji will not become an emperor, he does become the grandfather of an emperor, thus reinscribing himself and his mother into the imperial line. This chapter, where Genji first meets the Akashi Lady, is thus a pivotal moment in the Tale. In the scene depicted in our painting, Genji rides on horseback to the house where she is staying. It is a meeting that has been carefully arranged by her ambitious father, “the old priest.” Genji is intrigued by rumors of the Akashi Lady’s beauty and her skill as a poet and a musician. But, characteristically, he is also, simultaneously, pining for another woman, the Lady Murasaki, whom he has left behind in the capital. As the critic Raymond Mortimer puts it in his 1925 review of the first translation of the Tale, “During the course of this [first] volume at least seven different affairs rouse in [Genji] serious and delicate emotion. Is there any other novel which recognizes the possibility, and indeed the commonness, of such an experience?”

Attributed to:

Tosa School (Artist)

Dimensions:

Height: 18.5 in (46.99 cm)Width: 16.6 in (42.17 cm)Depth: 1.5 in (3.81 cm)

Style:

Japonisme (In the Style Of)

Materials and Techniques:

Paint,Paper

Place of Origin:

Japan

Period:

17th Century

Date of Manufacture:

17th Century

Condition:

Wear consistent with age and use.

Seller Location:

Kittery Point, ME

Reference Number:

Seller: 21661stDibs: LU837635067072

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