Japanese Screens and Castles

Japan's great families, the military lords (daimyō), the shoguns and rich merchants, decorated their castles and houses with folding screens (byōbu) and painted sliding doors. A screen is usually six panels joined by hinges, often made as a pair. Many were painted on gold leaf, which glowed in dim rooms lit by lamps and by light reflected from paper windows. Like the ukiyo-e prints of the towns, screens belong to Japan's early modern age, but they were made for the elite.

Looking closely: Irises

Describe. Clumps of blue-violet irises with green leaves march across a plain gold ground, with no water, no sky and no horizon. Analyze. Kōrin (1658 to 1716) used only a few colors: mineral azurite blue and malachite green on gold. The clumps repeat, some almost exactly, in a rhythm that rises and falls across the panels. With no ground line, the gold reads as both space and flat surface. Interpret. Educated viewers knew a famous episode from The Tales of Ise, a Heian-period poem tale, set at a place called Yatsuhashi ("Eight Bridges") where irises bloomed. Kōrin left out the bridges and the travelers and kept only the flowers, trusting viewers to remember the story. The work belongs to the Rinpa school of bold, decorative design.

Not all screens were gold. Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539 to 1610) painted Pine Trees in ink alone, in the Momoyama period just before Edo began. Pines loom out of mist and fade into it; large parts of the paper are left blank, so the empty space becomes fog. It is a National Treasure of Japan. Whether Tōhaku meant it as a finished work or as a study is debated.

Himeji Castle

Castles were built in a burst of construction around 1600, as warlords fought to unify Japan. Himeji, largely completed between 1601 and 1609 under the lord Ikeda Terumasa, rises on stone walls with layered white plaster roofs, which earned it the name "White Heron Castle." It survived wars, fires and earthquakes and is a World Heritage Site. Its rooms were the setting for painted screens and doors.