Sesshū Tōyō
Master of ink painting.
Sesshū was a Zen monk who travelled to China in 1467–1469. He developed his own powerful style of ink painting and is regarded as Japan's greatest painter.
Sesshū Tōyō was born in 1420 in Bitchū province, in present-day Okayama. He became a novice at a Zen temple at an early age. A famous legend tells that as a boy he was tied to a pillar as a punishment and drew a mouse on the floor with his tears, so lifelike that the monk thought it was real. It is a legend, but it has made him known to every Japanese schoolchild.
As a young man he moved to the Shōkoku-ji temple in Kyoto, where he studied Zen and ink painting, including with the painter Shūbun. In the 1460s he settled in Yamaguchi in western Japan under the protection of the powerful Ōuchi clan.
In 1467–1469 he travelled with a trade mission to Ming China. He visited temples, was given an honorary position at a Zen temple and travelled to Beijing. He studied both the Chinese landscape and contemporary painting. By the time he returned home he had developed a style of his own: strong, angular outlines, clear structure and bold contrasts. He built a studio and continued to travel around Japan painting.
His best-known works include a landscape scroll more than fifteen metres long from 1486 in the Mōri Museum in Hōfu, the Autumn and Winter Landscapes in the Tokyo National Museum, and the Haboku Landscape of 1495 in the same museum. Haboku means “broken ink”: the landscape is painted with quick, wet patches and few lines. He also painted a view of Amanohashidate, a famous sandbar.
Sesshū died around 1506. He is regarded as Japan's greatest ink painter, and six of his works have been designated National Treasures, more than for any other artist. Many later painters, among them Hasegawa Tōhaku, claimed to carry on his legacy.