Rimpa school

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Spring Landscape, unknown Rimpa school painter, 18th century, six-screen ink and gold on paper.

Rimpa (琳派), also romanized as Rinpa, is one of the major historical schools of Japanese decorative painting. It was created in the 17th century by the artists Hon'ami Kōetsu (1558-1637) and Tawaraya Sōtatsu (d. c. 1643). Roughly fifty years later, the style was consolidated by brothers Ōgata Kōrin and Kenzan.

Both founding artists already came from families of cultural significance; Kōetsu was one of a family of swordsmiths who had served the imperial court and the great contemporary warlords, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, in addition to social ties to the Ashikaga shoguns. Kōetsu’s father connoisseured swords for the Maeda lords, and Kōetsu himself continued this arrangement with the Maeda, alongside a similar occupation concerning art; he came to know other veterans in the subject. Consequently, he was less concerned with swords as opposed to painting, calligraphy lacquerwork and the Way of Tea (he created several Raku Ware tea bowls.) His own painting style reflected his prowess in Japan’s artistic past, recalling the flamboyant aristocratic genre of the Heian period.

Kōetsu was acquainted with Tawaraya Sōtatsu, a fan-painter in Kyoto who entered the court as a creator of decorative calligraphic papers. The two masters collaborated on numerous occasions, with Sōtatsu providing gilded papers for Kōetsu. Sōtatsu himself revived the classical Yamato-e genre Kōetsu pursued, and pioneered it with bold outlines and striking colour schemes, in addition to a wet-in-wet technique. Together, the artists revived Yamato-e with contemporary innovations. It was similar to the more ornate reaches of the contemporary Kano school, but concerned itself with richly embellished, intimate natural depictions.

Further innovations continued to the Rimpa school in the seventeenth century. Ogata Korin, the son of a prosperous Kyoto merchant, reputedly trained by his cultured father in the Kano school, but also in Rimpa. Korin’s innovation was an unconventional abstraction of nature that involved colour gradations, mixing of colours on the surface to achieve wonderfully eccentric effects and infinite gradations in hue, as well as liberal use of precious substances like gold and pearl in the signature Rimpa tradition. In this era, the famous Genroku period (1688-1704), a period of cultural flowering, the Rimpa school reached its apex.

The stereotypical standard painting in the Rimpa style would involve simple natural subjects like birds, plants and flowers, with the background filled in with gold leaf. Many of these paintings were used on the sliding doors and walls (fusuma) of noble homes.