Kanō Eitoku
The gold painter of the castles.
Kanō Eitoku decorated the warlords' castles with immense trees, lions and birds on gold grounds. Most of the works burned with the castles.
Kanō Eitoku was born in Kyoto in 1543. He was the grandson of Kanō Motonobu, who had made the Kanō school Japan's leading painting workshop, and he was trained by his grandfather and his father. Even as a young man he worked on major commissions. In 1566, together with his father, he painted sliding doors at Jukō-in, a sub-temple of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, which survive to this day.
Eitoku worked during the Momoyama period, when warlords such as Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi unified Japan and built vast castles and palaces. They wanted art that displayed power and wealth. Eitoku decorated Nobunaga's castle at Azuchi, completed around 1579, and later Hideyoshi's Osaka Castle and the Jurakudai palace. He led large teams of painters to keep up with the work.
His style is often called “the great style”. He painted enormous trees, cypresses and pines whose trunks and branches stretch across several screens, as well as lions, tigers and birds, with forceful brushstrokes and strong colours against a ground of gold leaf. In dark castle halls the gold reflected the light and made the rooms glow. One of his best-known works is the screen of Chinese lions in the Imperial Collections in Tokyo. A pair of screens with views of Kyoto, which Nobunaga gave to the warlord Uesugi Kenshin, is also attributed to him.
Almost all his great wall paintings were destroyed when the castles burned or were demolished. Eitoku died in 1590, only 47 years old, possibly from overwork. His style shaped Momoyama art and the Kanō school, which remained Japan's official school of painting throughout the Edo period.