Pair of Japanese Six-Panel Tale of Genji Screens

#18342: Pair of Japanese Six-Panel Tale of Genji Screens
Japanese, 17th century
Open: height 136.5cm, width 287cm, depth 1.5cm
Closed: height 136.5cm, width 49cm, depth 10cm

This pair of six-panel folding screens (byōbu) is painted in ink and colour on paper over a gold ground, and sets episodes from the Tale of Genji across a continuous landscape. Each panel measures approximately 137cm in height by 49cm in width. Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century narrative supplied Japanese painters with subject matter for some seven centuries, and the folding-screen format allowed the fifty-four chapters to be redistributed as a single field rather than a sequence of separate illustrations.
The compositions are organised by bands of gold cloud worked with a dense pattern of impressed roundels. The clouds divide the ground into discrete episodes while binding them into one panorama, with palace enclosures, verandas, garden walls and stands of pine and maple running beneath and between them. Interiors are shown according to the fukinuki yatai convention, in which roofs and ceilings are omitted so that figures can be viewed from above, seated on tatami behind raised blinds and standing screens. Courtiers in black caps and ceremonial robes, women in layered silks with hair falling to the floor, and attendants in the gardens are painted in mineral pigments over the gold, with ink outline throughout.
Seasonal markers run across both screens in the manner of the four garden quarters of Genji's Rokujō mansion: flowering cherry and maple at the outer edges, a pine weighted with snow at the lower centre of the first screen, and expanses of moss-green bank elsewhere. One passage shows two boats with dragon and phoenix prows carrying musicians with flute and drum, a motif associated with the spring music party of the 'Butterflies' chapter; another, on the second screen, shows an ox-drawn carriage with a large fan-shaped ornament attended by outriders, and a further passage a boat on dark water among willows.
The paintings are bordered in blue silk brocade woven with interlocking gold roundels and floral motifs, edged with a narrow patterned silk fillet, and mounted in black lacquer frames. The corners and hinges are fitted with engraved gilt-metal mounts decorated with chrysanthemum rosettes against scrolling foliage on a punched ground.
Screens of this subject were produced in quantity in Kyoto during the seventeenth century, largely by workshops working in the Tosa idiom, and were commissioned for aristocratic and samurai households, frequently as part of a bridal trousseau.
$112,500