2-739-146 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Returning Home, mid-1500s. This painting bears a seal reading Shokei. The style of the seal resembles that used by Kenko Shokei (active about 1470-after 1523), a monk and painter at the Zen temple Kenchoji in Kamakura who studied in Kyoto for three years with Geiami (1431-1485?), painter to the shogun as well as curator of the shogun’s collection of art. However, the seal was carved to look like Shokei’s and added to the painting at a later date by someone who thought the unsigned landscape was similar to his work. The painting has compositional and some stylistic similarities to images by other Kanto-based artists like Maejima Soyu (active mid-1500s), who trained with Kano school artists. Specifically, the pines clinging to the massive boulder in front of a pavilion with mountains receding into atmospheric space—in a composition weighted in a single corner of the painting—is a Kanto-inflected derivation of the painting of the Zen monk-painter Tensho Shubun (active about 1414), whose work was a major inspiration for Kano school painters.