Yamato-e: a name whose boundaries changed

In the Heian period, Japanese landscapes and subjects helped distinguish yamato-e from Chinese-themed kara-e. Later encounters with new Chinese painting modes, including ink painting, changed the comparison. Identifying a work therefore requires its period and context, rather than a checklist of colours shared by every example.

Unrolling a story and opening its rooms

A handscroll unfolds section by section, allowing text and pictures to shape a story. The Tale of Genji scrolls and the Legends of Mount Shigi offer different uses of setting, people and continuous action. Bird’s-eye views, omitted roofs and clouds dividing space can be useful devices to examine in particular paintings. No single device is compulsory across the category.

Dividing a shared interior

Kashiwagi I in the Genji scrolls makes an awkward family visit visible. After giving birth to Kaoru, the Third Princess wishes to become a nun. Her father, the retired emperor Suzaku, visits; Genji opposes her wish. The Tokugawa Art Museum explains the conflicting feelings through the story. In the picture, blinds, screens and diagonal architectural lines partition the figures, while the elevated viewpoint lets the viewer see into the separate spaces. Physical divisions help make emotional distance legible.

Showing successive moments

The Mount Shigi scrolls offer another way to organise time. In the Flying Storehouse episode, flight, pursuit, an appeal and the return of rice bales form a sequence of actions. The nun’s visit to the Great Buddha uses repeated appearances of the same person within one picture. These are successive moments, not a crowd of identical women: repetition carries time across the painted surface.

Court subjects and Kamakura narratives

Courtly life, poetry and seasonal imagery shaped early developments. Kamakura-period works expanded narratives about temples, shrines, biographies and warfare, alongside portraiture. Their audiences and purposes extended beyond the court. Describing all of them as elegant would conceal important differences in what the pictures do.

Workshop collaboration and Buddhist images

Courtly and religious painting were not sealed off from one another. The Tokyo National Museum identifies increasing collaboration between court painters and Buddhist image makers from the middle Heian period. Yamato-e landscape methods entered Buddhist paintings, including images of Amida’s descent, through this shared production. Workshops as well as patrons helped carry techniques between subjects.

New approaches and old models

During the Nanbokuchō and Muromachi periods, established traditions interacted with ink painting and changing uses of colour, gold and silver. Court painters and lineages including Tosa helped transmit them. In the Momoyama period, Kano and Tosa painting also influenced one another. Edo-period Sumiyoshi painters and copies of earlier works continued this process. A surviving copy has its own production date, distinct from that of its model.

The Tosa’s loss and recovery of office

That institutional continuity was interrupted. The Tosa held the court office of edokoro-azukari from the later fifteenth century, but lost it when the family succession broke down late in the Warring States period. Tosa Mitsuoki recovered the position in the mid-seventeenth century, after which the school retained it through the Edo period. Transmission involved a loss and recovery of office and commissions, rather than an unbroken family monopoly.

Modern revival

A late-Edo revival renewed the study of classical paintings. Tosa and Sumiyoshi painters then took part in Meiji art associations, carrying inherited practices into new institutions for exhibition and art education. In the Taishō and early Shōwa periods, Matsuoka Eikyū and his pupils explored a new yamato-e through classical subjects and techniques. The tradition continued to change beyond the Edo period.

Matsuoka’s Pond at Ikaho

Matsuoka’s Pond at Ikaho, dated 1925 and shown at the sixth Imperial Art Exhibition, gives that reinvention a particular subject. Tokyo University of the Arts explains its story of a woman at Mount Haruna who changes into a snake and enters the water. The museum links the painting’s classical subject with observed landscape and individual psychology. Revival here involved deciding how an inherited story could work in a modern painting, rather than simply copying an old scroll.

A folding screen presents a broad visual field, while a handscroll reveals sections as it is unrolled. Both can carry seasonal or narrative subjects. Their different formats change how much of a picture can be seen at once.