Famous Themes for Painting Study Known as “The Garden of Painting” (Gaen)

Kano Tan'yū

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Kano Tan’yū studied prodigious numbers of works from the history of both Chinese and Japanese painting. The fruit of his study was a vast corpus of pattern books and drawings of works of art. This set of two scrolls is filled with an assortment of copies, studies, and sketches. The first scroll is unrolled to a section showing a study of a painting by Mu Qi, a Chinese Chan (Zen) Buddhist monk-painter of the Southern Song dynasty. The second scroll is open to a sketch of the Buddhist figure Hotei after a work by Kano Motonobu (1476–1559).

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art