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Artist Unknown The Narrow Ivy Road Edo period (1615-1868), late 17th/early 18th century image 1
Artist Unknown The Narrow Ivy Road Edo period (1615-1868), late 17th/early 18th century image 2
Lot 165TP

Artist Unknown The Narrow Ivy Road
Edo period (1615-1868), late 17th/early 18th century

7 November 2019, 14:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street

£10,000 - £15,000

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Artist Unknown The Narrow Ivy Road

Edo period (1615-1868), late 17th/early 18th century
A six-panel folding screen, ink and mineral colours over gold leaf on paper, a mass of ascending and descending vine stems and leaves with stylized silver clouds against a dark green ground, unsigned. Overall: 165cm x 374cm (65in x 147¼in); image: 147cm x 355.6cm (57 7/8in x 140in).

Footnotes

Provenance:
Eskenazi Ltd., London, 1998.
John J. Studzinski CBE, London.

The striking design of this lot, with a low band of ground or cloud at the left balanced by a central band at the right, appears to be remotely based on a famous pair of six-panel screens attributed to Tawaraya Sotatsu (circa 1570-1640), designated an Important Cultural Property and now in the Shokokuji Temple, Kyoto; see William Watson (ed.), The Great Japan Exhibition: Art of the Edo Period, exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1981, cat. no.19. That screen pair is a visualization of the Tsuta no hosomichi (Narrow Ivy Road), an episode from Chapter Nine of the tenth-century poetic narrative Ise monogatari (The Ise Tales) in which the hero, Ariwara Narihira, and his friends arrive at Mount Utsu in Suruga, where they find the path is dark and all but choked with ivy; the present screen offers a striking new imagining of the celebrated episode.

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