"During the Ming dynasty, Chinese paintings were transmitted to Japan and became an essential visual source for Japanese paintings of the Edo period (1615-1867). Kanō Tan’yū (1602-1674), a leading artist of the early Edo Kanō School, spent his lifetime copying numerous earlier Chinese paintings, as well as some Japanese and Korean works. He left thousands of small-sized sketches, called Tan’yū Shukuzu [Tan’yū’s Small Sketches], leaving a lasting impact on the Japanese painting realm. They were made for multiple purposes, as painting models, authentication notes, teaching materials, and a symbol of a painter’s status. Sanko Minagawa’s research survey indicates the existence of more than 107 sketches of Chinese female images, as one of the major subjects, in Tan’yū Shukuzu.
This paper focuses on Tan’yū’s copies of Chinese female-figure paintings (often called tobijinzu, “pictures of Chinese beauties,” in Japanese) that were largely overlapped with while beyond the scope of the shinü tu or meiren hua genre (paintings of beautiful ladies) in Chinese art. It discusses the reproduction mechanism of Shukuzu in comparison with the Chinese fenben practice. It also examines the attributed Chinese artists’ signatures copied by Tan’yū in Shukuzu, e.g., Qiu Ying and Tang Yin (famed for beautiful women paintings), Zhao Mengfu and Zhao Yong (no extant authentic female-figure paintings), and it identifies the late Ming Suzhou Pian workshop as an important original Chinese source. It provides a fresh angle to approach the perception of Chinese “forgery” paintings and the long-term use of Shukuzu in re-making and reinterpreting Chinese paintings in Edo Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Through two case studies from a transcultural perspective, it shows the combination of two Chinese pictorial systems, gengzhi tu (Pictures of Tilling and Weaving) and shinü tu, in a Kanō School scroll; and the transformation of the Queen Mother of the West, from a powerful female Daoist immortal signified by peaches of immortality to a secularized beautiful lady holding peach blossoms, in Kanō School paintings.