Kanō Eihaku
Table of contents
Kanō Eihaku (狩野永伯): Painter of the Kyō-Kanō
Kanō Eihaku (狩野永伯) belonged to the Kyō-Kanō, that branch of the Kanō school which remained in Kyōto when the family's most influential houses settled in Edo in the 17th century. He was the son of Kanō Eikei and lost his father in 1702, when he was sixteen years old. He died at the age of 78 and was buried at Sennyū-ji, the burial site of the imperial house.
Work for the Imperial Palace
From 1708, Eihaku was involved in wall painting work at the Imperial Palace, and as late as 1747 he contributed on the occasion of the accession of Momozono-Tennō. This is instructive for placing the Kyō-Kanō: while the Edo houses worked for the Shogunate, the Kyōto branch remained bound to the court. Both lines carried on the same school painting, yet their patrons, and thus their pictorial tasks, differed.
The Kyō-Kanō as a Separate Branch
In the perception of art history, the Kyō-Kanō stands in the shadow of the Edo Oku-eshi houses, whose sequence of generations is documented without gaps. The Kyōto line was smaller and less visible, but remained active over generations and served the court, temples, and Kyōto patrons. Anyone wishing to place a Kanō hanging scroll should therefore check which branch a signature is to be attributed to – the components of the names differ systematically.
Landscape and Pictorial Sequence
Hanging scrolls of the Kanō tradition frequently appear not singly but as a sequence of two or three sheets, which are hung together. Such sets unfold their effect only in context: one motif answers another, and the arrangement in the tokonoma follows a fixed order from right to left. When acquiring a set, it is worth checking whether all parts come from the same hand and the same mounting.
