Bamboo

Yoshida Zotaku, who was an accomplished bamboo painter, was also a member of the samurai, or warrior class, in Edo Japan (1615–1868). During this period, the martial skills of the samurai were limited largely to ceremonial events. Declining expertise in the arts of warfare was offset by growing mastery of painting, calligraphy, poetry, and related arts. Faced with unemployment, many samurai became professional artists or supplemented their incomes as painting and literary teachers to their more affluent peers, the newly wealthy merchant class.

Trained in the orthodox Kano School of academic painting patronized by Japan’s ruling elite, Zotaku achieved a distinct style in his later paintings, as represented in this hanging scroll of living bamboo rendered in the monochrome ink fashion. Using a large brush, fully loaded with thick, black ink, Zotaku creates a sturdy stalk of the plant by starting at the middle top of the scroll and dragging his brush downward, repeating this gesture three more times progressively to the bottom right of the paper, suggesting the naturally occurring growth nodules of the bamboo plant with the three additional quick flicks of the brush.

He uses the same effect to render the leaves, where the cascading ink is dark and dense at the top of the scroll but seeps away into the white expanse of the paper toward the bottom. A diluted, pale gray ink used to form the second stalk introduces a visual counterpoint to the flattening effects of the main motifs and adds a note of spatial depth to the final composition.