Mountain Landscape

Tenshō Shūbun

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In late medieval Kyoto, cultural elites in the circle of the Ashikaga shoguns were especially interested in Chinese ink paintings. They voraciously collected works by Chinese masters and commissioned Japanese painters to create works in the style of their Chinese forebears. The compositions that make up this pair of screens are inspired by the Southern Song Chinese court painter Xia Gui (active ca. 1195–1230), whose works were highly prized in medieval Japan. Rock forms described with thick contour lines, textured by “axe-cut” brushstrokes and accented with “moss dots,” as well as paired foreground trees were immediately recognizable to the Japanese audience as elements of Xia Gui–style painting. Although later inscriptions by the painter Kano Yasunobu (1614–1685) name the original artist as the Kyoto painter Tenshō Shūbun, the paintings werenot actually created as a pair. Rather, they are a later combination of two separate works, bothby artists active shortly after Shūbun.

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