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The artistic taste of the imperial court, samurai and of artisans and merchants tended to be greatly different. This difference in artistic taste is reflected in the visual arts, and is highly evident in paintings and prints.
'Painter in his Studio with Students'. Kawahara Keiga.
'Illustrations from the Tale of Genji'. Tosa Mitsunobu.
Samurai traditionally mastered
not only the art of war (for example, wielding a sword), but also fine
arts, like painting, calligraphy, the tea ceremony, noh theatre, poetry
and the like. In the Tokugawa era, warfare had greatly diminished (since the
segoku jidai warring period had come to an end) and this led to a heightened
interest in samurai for mastering fine arts.
Although samurai
created paintings of their own at times, more often they just admired paintings
that were promoted by the shogunate. The shogunate revered and
promoted formality and Chinese themes-and-styles in art. The reason for this
was- it was believed to emphasize the Confucian virtues of loyalty, obedience
and respect (virtues which indirectly would support the Tokugawa regime).
To express its’ artistic
ideal, the shogunate employed and sponsored the Kano school of art.
The Kano school lasted for over two centuries, throughout the Tokugawa era,
partly because their style did not change significantly over the years. Kano
artists and other official painters, were not ‘artists’ in the modern sense,
but eshi translated as ‘samurai in painting’. As samurai, they were under
the obligation to daimyo or to the shogunate itself, hence they worked for a
fixed stipend instead of fame and fortune. Also, as samurai, they had to adhere
not only to ideal samurai aesthetics but also to samurai codes of conduct, which
were believed to lead to perfection of their art.
Ideally, middle or low-rank samurai were meant to have the same artistic liking (for formality and for Chinese arts) as high ranking samurai. Reality often differed from this ideal. Many samurai, especially Edo-city samurai developed a very different artistic taste, that of the artisans-and-merchants. This was the result of samurai spending their leisure time wandering around urban centers that were dominated by a vibrant townsmen culture. Ronin (unemployed) samurai sometimes used their fine-arts training to even secretly take up a profession in the arts.
'Exemplary Emperors'. Kano Tanyu.
'Dragons in Billowing Waves'. Kano Tsuenobu.
An audience hall in Kyoto.
'The Old Plum Tree'. Kano Sansetsu.
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