Collection: Painting

Japanese painters have long expressed their visions across a wide range of formats, each with its own function, materiality, and cultural significance.

Screens (Byōbu/Fusuma): Folding screens and sliding door panels were used to divide interiors and create atmospheric spaces. Their broad surfaces allowed for sweeping landscapes, seasonal motifs, and bold decorative compositions that shaped the mood of a room.

Hanging Scrolls: Designed for easy rotation with the seasons or occasions, hanging scrolls present paintings or calligraphy as self-contained vertical compositions. Their mounting fabrics complement the artwork while protecting it.

Handscrolls, Painted Books and Albums: Bound or accordion albums and hand scrolls allowed artists to create suites of images—illustrated tales, painting manuals, and themed collections—often blending text and image into unified objects of study or enjoyment. Unlike hanging scrolls, they are more intimate, inviting the viewer to journey into the private world within. Long, horizontal scrolls unrolled section by section or albums turned by hand, one page at a time, invite intimate, narrative viewing combining painting, calligraphy, and storytelling in a rhythmic progression experienced with both hands and eyes.

Prints (Woodblock and Beyond): Commercially produced woodblock prints transformed Japanese visual culture, making images accessible to a wide audience. Subjects ranged from kabuki actors and courtesans to landscapes, birds-and-flowers, and illustrated books.

Framed Art: Though historically less common than scrolls, framed works became more prevalent from the late Edo and Meiji periods, especially under Western influence. They include paintings on paper, silk, and occasionally on panel as well as traditional Western oil.

Oil Painting and Water Color: Oil painting entered Japan in the late sixteenth century with European missionaries, but it remained rare until the Meiji period (1868–1912), when Western-style art education was formally introduced. By the late nineteenth century, yōga became a major artistic field, taught at the Tokyo Fine Arts School and embraced by artists such as Kuroda Seiki, who helped reshape Japanese modern painting through plein-air realism and Impressionist influence. Oil painting thereafter existed alongside traditional nihonga, forming the dual foundations of modern Japanese art.

Paintings on Unusual materials: Japanese artists have also worked on wood, glass, lanterns and ceramic vessels, adapting their techniques to the character of each material. Examples include reverse-painted glass pictures, fan paintings, Ita-do Wood Doors and decorative temple plaques (ema) as well as many forms of pottery.

Together, these diverse formats reflect the adaptability of Japanese painting traditions—shaped by architecture, ritual, storytelling, commerce, and daily life—offering multiple ways to experience art intimately, ceremonially, or decoratively.