Hasegawa Tōhaku
The painter of the pines.
Hasegawa Tōhaku rivalled the Kanō school and painted both gold screens and the misty Pine Trees in ink.
Hasegawa Tōhaku was born in 1539 in Nanao on the Noto Peninsula by the Sea of Japan. He was adopted into the Hasegawa family, who were cloth dyers, and began his career as a painter of Buddhist images. Around 1571 he moved to Kyoto to try his luck in the capital.
In Kyoto he formed ties with the Zen temple Daitoku-ji and with the tea master Sen no Rikyū, and he gained access to Chinese paintings, including works by Muqi. He competed with the powerful Kanō school for the major commissions and founded his own workshop, the Hasegawa school. He claimed to be Sesshū's heir in the fifth generation.
In 1592 his workshop was commissioned to decorate the temple Shōun-ji, which Hideyoshi had built in memory of his son who had died as a child. The paintings of maples and cherry trees in gold and strong colours are now in the temple Chishaku-in in Kyoto. The cherry trees were painted by Tōhaku's son Kyūzō, who died young shortly afterwards.
His best-known work is Pine Trees, a pair of six-panel screens in ink alone on paper, in the Tokyo National Museum. Pines emerge and vanish in the mist, some sharp, others barely visible. Large areas of the paper are left blank. The image captures a mood of stillness, morning haze and solitude. It is counted among the greatest treasures of Japanese art.
Tōhaku died in 1610 while travelling to Edo. He showed that the same artist could master both the splendour of gold screens and the stillness of ink, and his Pine Trees has been of great importance for the understanding of a Japanese aesthetic of emptiness and suggestion.