Troubling Tōshun and honoring the orphan painting: The Tōshun-attributed eight views of Xiao and Xiang in the Masaki collection

Abstract

When scholars observe the Tōshun-attributed Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang in the Masaki collection, they generally invoke the artist and his lineage to contextualize its unusual interpretation of splashed ink (發墨) and the Yùjiàn mode (玉澗様). This thesis suggests that the Tōshun attribution may do more harm than good when scholars try to understand this work. Paintings become more visible, not less so, when freed from dubious attributions, and premodern texts are richer and more colorful when historians do not make unfair demands of them. This study revisits the historical evidence for the biography and attributions of San’eki Tōshun (三益等春 ca. 1468-1520). All of the painting attributions ultimately depend on seals, and this thesis questions their persuasive power. Scholars have also drawn upon Tōshun lore to contextualize the paintings that bear the Tōshun seal. This study investigates both the significance and signification of the ‘discursive’ Tōshun as a construct of early-modern texts, with particular emphasis on the Tōhaku Gasetsu (等伯画説 1592). In the Gasetsu, Tōshun’s character is used to illustrate key ideas about painterly lineage, transmission of brush-method, discipleship, and copying. In order to understand how these topics are treated in the Gasetsu, one must understand what Tōshun signifies. Through close-readings of Tōshun-related entries, this study raises the possibility that Tōshun was never a part of Hasegawa Tōhaku’s (長谷川等伯, 1539-1610) “fifth-generation Sesshū” claim, and questions whether the Gasetsu truly contains Japan’s first painterly lineage charts, pointing to ‘anti-lineal’ themes in the Gasetsu and its Muromachi precedents. Furthermore, it urges greater sensitivity to Nittsū’s (日通上人 1551-1608) voice in this dialogic text. Finally, this thesis tries to reconstruct the biography of this Eight Views set, proposing that the visual style does not bear the hallmarks of a Daitokuji priest or a Sesshū disciple. Instead, its brushwork, spatial construction, composition, and ink tonality seem to demonstrate the “second-hand modality” of painters like Sesson (雪村周継, 1492-1577), who were distant from both Kyoto and Sesshū.