Kanō school influenced by Chinese painting
The Kanō school (狩野派, Kanō-ha) is one of the most famous schools of Japanese painting.  The Kanō school of painting was the dominant style of painting from the late 15th century until the Meiji period which began in 1868, by which time the school had divided into many different branches.  The Kanō family itself produced a string of major artists over several generations, to which large numbers of unrelated artists trained in workshops of the school can be added.  Some artists married into the family and changed their names, and others were adopted.  According to the historian of Japanese art Robert Treat Paine, "another family which in direct blood line produced so many men of genius ... would be hard to find".The school began by reflecting a renewed influence from Chinese painting, but developed a brightly coloured and firmly outlined style for large panels decorating the castles of the nobility which reflected distinctively Japanese traditions, while continuing to produce monochrome brush paintings in Chinese styles.  It was supported by the shogunate, effectively representing an official style of art, which "in the 18th century almost monopolized the teaching of painting".  It drew on the Chinese tradition of literati painting by scholar-bureaucrats, but the Kanō painters were firmly professional artists, very generously paid if successful, who received a formal workshop training in the family workshop, in a similar way to European painters of the Renaissance or Baroque.  They worked mainly for the nobility, shōguns and emperors, covering a wide range of styles, subjects and formats.  Initially innovative, and largely responsible for the new types of painting of the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1573–1614), from the 17th century the artists of the school became increasingly conservative and academic in their approach.Early period
The school was founded by the very long-lived Kanō Masanobu (1434–1530), who was the son of Kagenobu, a samurai and amateur painter.   Masanobu was a contemporary of Sesshū (1420–1506), a leader of the revival of Chinese influence, who had actually visited China in mid-career, in around 1467. Sesshū may have been a student of Shūbun, recorded from about 1414 (as an apprentice) and 1465, another key figure in the revival of Chinese idealist traditions in Japanese painting.  Masanobu began his career in Shūbun's style, and works are recorded between 1463 and 1493.  He was appointed court artist to the Muromachi government, and his works evidently included landscape ink wash paintings in a Chinese style, as well as figure paintings and birds and flowers.  Few works certainly from his hand survive; they include a large screen with a crane in a snowy landscape in the Shinju-an, a sub-temple of Daitoku-ji.  Masanobu's Chinese-style Zhou Maoshu Appreciating Lotuses in the Kyushu National Museum (illustrated left) is a National Treasure of Japan.
Masanobu trained his sons Kanō Motonobu (1476–1559) and the younger Yukinobu (or Utanosuke).  Motonobu is usually credited with establishing the school's distinctive technique and style, or rather different styles, which brought a firmer line and stronger outlines to paintings using Chinese conventions.  Less interest was taken in subtle effects of atmospheric recession that in the Chinese models, and elements in the composition tend to be placed at the front of the picture space, often achieving decorative effects in a distinctively Japanese way.  Motonobu married the daughter of Tosa Mitsunobu, the head of the Tosa school, which continued the classic Japanese yamato-e style of largely narrative and religious subjects, and Kanō paintings subsequently also included more traditional Japanese subjects typical of that school.