A World of Edo Art

Over the two and a half centuries of the Edo period, artists innovated many techniques to convey their open-hearted visions of the natural world. In the early 1600s, Tawaraya Sōtatsu played with the magical effects of sumi ink dissolving in water to invent tarashikomi. The technique involves dripping darker ink onto lighter ink before it dries and allowing the sumi ink shades to naturally intermingle, resulting in the ethereal effects visible in Dragons and Clouds. Other artists, using brushstrokes of sumi ink to delineate the essence of things, created increasingly abstract art.

By this time, artists had been observing nature to inspire Japanese art and poetry for centuries. In the late 1700s, Maruyama Ōkyo elevated this practice to incorporate shasei, the technique of observing animals who are in constant motion to distill a single moment into an evocative shape that also conveys their individual emotions, a technique apparent in Puppies. The fluidity of Japanese calligraphy inspired artists to pair text with images centuries before the Edo period, but as this period progressed, artists began experimenting with this approach to create what we would now call collages of poetry and paintings.