Herd Boy with Ox

Although its worn vertical creases attest to frequent use, this gilded fan still provides a sumptuous setting for the illustration of a humble herdboy returning home on the back of a water buffalo after a day's work in the rice paddies. With the help of his switch, the herdboy urges the buffalo to wade through the shallow water. Short stubbles of rice plants suggest that the time is late spring or early summer. A small patch of land with a growth of bamboo at the lower left serves as a foreground .Gentle hills with a thick growth of trees close off the distant view. A shimmer of gold enhances the background and lends a poetic note.

Bulls and water buffalo had a special place in Chinese symbolism, both secular and religious. An emblem of spring and agriculture, the water buffalo was by extension regarded as a water god and symbol of the earth's fertility. Chinese Daoists saw the water buffalo as representing the honest, bucolic life, and the theme of the herdboy and buffalo as signifying the cyclical rhythms of nature. In Chan Buddhism, the relationship of the buffalo to its master and the act of herding itself assumed a spiritual significance suggesting the quest for enlightenment, as in the parables of the Ten Ox-Herding Songs (cat. nos. 42, 53).[1]

Many Chinese paintings of oxen or water buffalo are recorded in the catalogues of the shogunal collections.[2] A small round fan-shaped painting of the theme attributed to the Chinese painter Xia Gui (fl. ca. 1195– 1230) and now in the Tokyo National Museum (fig. 33), which must have been imported to Japan at least before the end of the fifteenth century,[3] appears to have been the model for several late-fifteenth-century Japanese paintings,[4] among them the Burke fan, dated to about the same time. Here, the buffalo and the herdboy are depicted from a closer vantage point than in the Chinese model, and a second buffalo is eliminated.

Otherwise, the paintings are nearly identical, even in such details as the configuration of the shoreline and rice paddies, the posture and costume of the herdboy, and the ax-cut strokes that delineate the hills in the background. That the painting is most likely in the secular tradition and unconnected to Zen allegory is suggested by the clear indication of the season and the implication that the beast and its master have performed their task in the rice fields.

A large seal in the shape of a cauldron with a tall neck and bulbous body is impressed at the lower right, though the characters are not clear enough to decipher. Its shape is similar to that found in a group of seals thought to have been used by Kano Masanobu (1434–1530). Masanobu, the first nonpractitioner of Zen to be appointed official painter to the Ashikaga shoguns, laid the foundations of the Kano school, which was to influence the course of Japanese painting for more than three hundred years. While the biography of this important artist is slowly emerging, only a small number of paintings are accepted as genuine.[5]

Masanobu is thought to have been born in eastern Japan, either in Kazusa or Izu Province (Chiba and Shizuoka Prefectures, respectively). Nothing is known about his early training or about how he came to receive commissions from the prominent temples of the Gozan (Five Mountains) system in Kyoto. His first such commission was realized in 1463. Nearly twenty years later, he is believed to have succeeded Oguri Sōtan (1413–1481) as official painter to the shogun, the most august position a painter could attain. Once he was appointed, his projects are recorded in detail.[6]

Painters who worked for the shoguns often used Chinese paintings in the shogunal collection as models. The Burke fan painting, which closely resembles the Xia Gui, may have been a direct copy, unlike other similar works, which seem to be one step removed from the original. It has not yet been firmly established that the Xia Gui was in the shogunal collection, but most likely it was in an important collection that Masanobu would have had access to.

Folding fans were made by court artists as gifts and presented annually by the painters themselves to the shoguns who employed them and to members of the imperial court; they were also popular export items in China and Korea. A courtier named Sanjōnishi Sanetaka refers in his diary, the Sanetakakō ki in the year 1529, to fans presented by the court artists as Edokoro fans (after the Edokoro, or Imperial Court Office of Painting); those presented by the Kano artists he terms Kano fans.[7] Because Masanobu was the leading Kano artist of the time, it is most likely that he himself presented them. The Burke fan is heavily embellished with gold leaf, which suggests that it may have been made as one of the annual gifts. If the seal on this fan can be read as "Masanobu," and if the painting can be safely attributed to him, it should be dated sometime after 1491, when Masanobu adopted this sobriquet.

Folding fans, indispensable during the summer heat, were usually discarded at the end of a season. Those that were treasured for their painted decorations or for other, perhaps personal, reasons were often preserved in albums or on folding screens. The present fan may have survived in this manner and was later remounted as a hanging scroll.



[Miyeko Murase 2000, Bridge of Dreams]



[1] Schafer 1963, p. 73; and Ho et al. 1980, no. 41.

[2] For the Butsunichian kumotsu mokuroku and the Kundaikan sōchōki, see Kamakura-shi Shi Hensan Iinkai 1956; and Sadō koten zenshū 1967, vol. 2.

[3] "Kakei hitsu Hōgyū zu" 1904, p. 182; and Kyoto National Museum 1996, fig. 7.

[4] For a painting by Sekijō (fl. late 15th century) destroyed in the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, see Watanabe Hajime 1985, p. 120, fig. 31. Another, indirect copy is reproduced on p. 131, fig. 64.

[5] For the life of Masanobu, see ibid., pp. 165-226; for documentary material (shiryō), pp. 192–216; and for seals (inpu), pp. 215–16. For additional information on Masanobu's life, see Yamaoka Taizō 1978; Ueno Kenji 1986, pp. 114–24; and Kawai Masatomo 1988, pp. 167–80.

[6] Watanabe Hajime 1981, pp. 192–216.

[7] Sanjōnishi Sanetaka 1979, entries for the twelfth day of the eighth month of the second year of the Kyōroku era (1529), and the first day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the same era (1532), which refers only to the Kano fans.

Inscription: Inscription on box reads: "At the request of Bairo-an, I made this box inscription. Late April, 1958, Honan Tayama." (Honan Tayama was the director of the Matsunaga Museum).

Marking: Masanobu (?), cauldron-shaped seal

[ S. Yabumoto Co., Ltd. 藪本宗四郎 Japanese, Tokyo, 1972; sold to Burke]; Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation , New York (until 2015; donated to MMA)

Richmond. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. "Jewel Rivers: Japanese Art from The Burke Collection.," October 25, 1993–January 2, 1994.

Santa Barbara Museum of Art. "Jewel Rivers: Japanese Art from The Burke Collection.," February 26, 1994–April 24, 1994.

Minneapolis Institute of Arts. "Jewel Rivers: Japanese Art from The Burke Collection.," October 14, 1994–January 1, 1995.

Kyoto National Museum. "The Kano School in the Muromachi Period," October 15, 1996–November 17, 1996.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Masterpieces of Japanese Art from The Mary Griggs Burke Collection," March 30–June 25, 2000.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Enlightening Pursuits," February 28–August 5, 2001.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Celebrating the Arts of Japan: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection," October 20, 2015–May 14, 2017.

Murase, Miyeko, Il Kim, Shi-yee Liu, Gratia Williams Nakahashi, Stephanie Wada, Soyoung Lee, and David Sensabaugh. Art Through a Lifetime: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection. Vol. 1, Japanese Paintings, Printed Works, Calligraphy. [New York]: Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, [2013], p. 79, cat. no. 100.