Notes:
This vase is painted in the Kano style named after the school of painters in landscapes and mountains scenes with pavilions and waterfals and lakes
See Ayers, Impey and Mallet, 'Porcelain for Palaces: The Fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750', 1990 (London: OCS) p.103 for a very similar vase.
Influenced by Zen Buddhism and artistic styles from ancient China, the tradition of landscape painting in Japan evolved over thousands of years. In the Edo period, representations of idealised seclusion within the landscape became a way for literati artists to distance themselves from the political realities of life in Tokugawa Japan, modelling their practice on the wenwren of ancient China who had retreated to the mountains to seek self-cultivation and freedom from the Mongol government. Aligning themselves with this ‘Southern School’ of Chinese landscape painting, Japanese artists of the period adopted an approach characterised by a free and ‘untrammelled’ style to directly convey the experience of the artist within their surroundings. Such representations of the natural world contributed to the on-going development of a distinctly Japanese mode of landscape painting, which in turn came to influence arts outside the traditional sphere of ink painting, including ceramic design.
