Hasegawa Tōhaku

Hasegawa Tōhaku ( Japanese 長谷川 等 伯 ; * 1539 in Noto Province (today: Nanao ); † 1610 in Edo ) was a Japanese painter during the Azuchi Momoyama period . He created ink drawings , colored portraits , animal and nature paintings.

Career

Hasegawa began his artistic career with drawings for Buddhist monasteries in the province of Noto. He went to Kyoto when he was about 30 years old, and there developed his own style of ink painting , which emerged from the Kanō school , but executed the drawings more decorative and larger. He worked on wall screens and sliding doors and was thus in competition with the popular Kanō Eitoku , with whom he fought for the favor of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi . Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered him to Edo , where he also died.

Screens pine forest

Around 1590 he created the pair of adjustable screens Kiefernwald ( 松林 図 , Shōrin-zu , German "Kiefernhain-Bildnis"), a pair of six-part ink drawings on paper that are in the Tokyo National Museum. In addition to the wall paintings of a maple tree in the former Shōun-ji (today: Chishaku-in ), the work is one of the national treasures of Japan . Each screen is approximately 1.50 mx 3.50 m in size. The pines are drawn with ink strokes in different shades of gray. Hasegawa used different, partially bundled brushes and bamboo sticks split at the end. The pines stand in groups in the fog, some protrude from it and escape into the background. The shape of the trees only reveals itself to the viewer from a distance, whereby the haze is created by the unpainted areas of the paper. The work served Hiroshi Sugimoto in 2001 as a template for the work Pine Trees , in which he implemented the six-part structure and the motif with photographs of pines from the imperial palace garden in Tokyo. The Rietberg Museum in Zurich dedicated a solo exhibition to the painter in 2000, in which the pine forest could be seen for 6 weeks.

• National treasures
• 

  Pine forest screen, left

• 

  Pine forest screen, right

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  Maple tree

Individual evidence

1. ↑ www.kyoto.zaq.ne.jp. ( Memento of the original from December 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ HASEGAWA TOHAKU: 400th Memorial Retrospective
3. ↑ NZZ Online from June 16, 2001 .

Web links

Commons : Hasegawa Tohaku  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Hasegawa Tōhaku at artfacts.net
• Literature by and about Hasegawa Tōhaku in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography at Nanao Art Museum, Ishikawa (Japanese)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Hasegawa is the family name, Tōhaku the first name.