Landscape

Saito Toshitsu was the adopted son of Saito Tojun, who headed a family painting school whose members were official painters for the local daimyo (military lord). Toshitsu followed his adopted father in the official position as daimyo court painter when Tojun died in 1626.

Toshitsu’s extant paintings are few in number. In this work, the artist has contrasted dense pictorial passages with broad expanses of blank space, employed bold brushstrokes, and favored a rich tonality between pale and dark inks. The dramatic rocks, angular twisted tress, and accentuated verticality of the composition of this undated landscape reveal the influences of the Liang Kai (circa 1140–circa 1210) and other Northern Song dynasty landscape artists. This suggests that Toshitsu had access to Chinese paintings (or their copies) from which to study. But like previous members of this dynasty of family painters, Toshitsu transformed his Chinese models into a visual vocabulary suited to Japanese taste.