page_title: Shibata Zeshin
section_title: Style
hierarchical_section_title: Shibata Zeshin / Style
caption_attribution_description: English: Crows Fly by Red Sky at Sunset Portfolio/Series: from the Series Hana Kurabe Medium: Woodblock color print Period: Meiji Period Dimensions: 9 x 9 5/16 in. (22.9 x 23.7 cm) Signature: Signed: "Zeshin" Collections:Asian Art Museum Location: Brooklyn Museum Accession Number: 2007.32.102 Credit Line: Gift of the estate of Dr. Eleanor Z. Wallace
context_page_description: Shibata Zeshin was a Japanese lacquer, painter and print artist of the late Edo period and early Meiji era. He has been called "Japan's greatest lacquerer", but his reputation as painter and print artist is more complex: In Japan, he is known as both too modern, a panderer to the Westernization movement, and also an overly conservative traditionalist who did nothing to stand out from his contemporaries. Despite holding this complicated reputation in Japan, Zeshin has come to be well regarded and much studied among the art world of the West, in Britain and the United States in particular.
context_section_description: Zeshin experimented with the technical aspects of lacquer.  He mixed his lacquers with a variety of substances to achieve different colors and textures, and to control the consistency and flexibility.  He invented a method of painting with lacquer sap directly on paper sized with dōsa (a solution of alum and animal glue), to prevent flaking when his urushi-e scroll paintings were rolled up.  He used bronze in his lacquer to simulate the appearance and texture of iron, and cereal starch to thicken his lacquer to simulate, at least in some respects, the effect of Western oil painting.
  Zeshin remains, in fact, the only artist to be successful in the medium of urushi-e, as it requires specially treated paper, and a very particular consistency of lacquer to be used as paint. Zeshin also revived a complex lacquer technique called seikai-ha to produce wave forms by drawing a comb through the rapidly solidifying lacquer; this technique is so difficult it had not been used for over a century.
  However, although he used many revolutionary elements in his work, both technically and creatively, Zeshin's works were always, on the whole, very traditional. In the brand-new medium of lacquer painting, he would paint traditional subjects like birds and flowers, insects, waterfalls and dragons. He copied a famous painting of a tiger by his teacher Maruyama Okyo, in lacquer.  A red, black and gold lacquer picnic set by Zeshin serves as another good example of this revolutionary traditionalism. The picnic set is made in very traditional style, almost entirely of red and black lacquer with gold decorations of leaves and branches. However, on the serving tray is a series of butterflies and dragonflies, inlaid into the surface of the serving tray and carved out of iridescent seashell.
  Zeshin's signature was always quite subdued, and on occasion he would be playful with the idea of the signature. There is a decorative tsuba (sword handguard) made by him on which an ant, displayed in relief in lacquer, is carrying away the "shin" character (真) of Zeshin's signature to the other side of the piece.
  It has been said that much of Zeshin's work strongly represents the aesthetic concept of iki (粋), which might be translated as "chic." The Edo concept of iki, known as sui in Kansai, was described most authoritatively by Kuki Shūzō, but like the English ideas of chic, cool, and stylish, the precise colors, patterns, and other stylistic elements that constitute iki are nearly impossible to pin down. Nevertheless, that said, Zeshin's works are often labeled as iki, and considered to have just the right balance of tradition with the new, being beautiful but not gaudy and simple but not boring and smart but not arrogant. His style has been compared by some to haiku, in that its beauty and meaning is more powerful in what is not shown than by what is.
  Along with Nakayama Komin and Shirayama Shosai, he is considered one of the three great late lacquerers of Japan.
caption: Crows Fly by Red Sky at Sunset, woodblock print, ca. 1880 (Brooklyn Museum)
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