Heron and Willow Branch

This intimate hanging scroll illustrates Kano Yasanobu’s judicious brushwork in nuanced shades of monochrome ink. Like other Kano School artists—a hereditary lineage of painters that rose to prominence from the 16th century while in service to the imperial court and Japan’s ruling warrior samurai class—Yasanobu often combined elements of Chinese and local Japanese painting elements in a single work.

Here, Yasanobu’s modulated ink tones, hovering between washy pale grays and intense blacks, bring to mind Chinese brush-and-ink styles favored for centuries by amateur-scholar and professional court painters in China.

In his choice of subject matter, however, Yasanobu introduced other stylistic references. His image is based on a composition by Yasanobu’s famous predecessor, Kano Motonobu (1476–1559). Featuring a lone heron on a wintry willow branch, the image is set artfully in the left-hand corner of an otherwise empty ground, in which the blank expanse of paper evokes the chilly vastness of a mist-filled wintry landscape. Motonobu’s asymmetrical design, in turn, derives from the "one-corner" compositions favored in 13th-century China during the Song dynasty (960–1279).