A World of Edo Art
The Tosa School (15th–19th century) was a hereditary school of painters that had served the military rulers and the imperial court for several centuries before the Edo period. Tosa artists were considered the leading practitioners of Yamato-e (pictures of Japan), a genre that often featured highly stylized landscape themes, and were most closely allied with the court of the emperor. They were specialists in artistic depictions of courtly classics, particularly the eleventh-century novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), written by noblewoman and poet Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 973–1014 or 1025). In the early Edo period, Tosa Mitsuoki (1617–1691) reenergized the school by integrating the use of Kanō School-style brushwork and Chinese-style realistic sketches into Tosa paintings, becoming famous for his paintings of quails.
