Artwork · 17th century · Kano Sansetsu

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Old Plum

Kano Sansetsu1646Four sliding-door panels (fusuma); ink, color, gold, and gold leaf on paper174.6 × 485.5 cm

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At a glance

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On a gold-leaf ground, the trunk of an old plum tree bends sharply across four sliding doors, its branches covered in white and pink blossoms.
Kano Sansetsu painted these four sliding-door panels in 1646, using ink, color, gold and gold leaf on paper.
Side by side, the four panels stretch more than 15 feet. Doors that divided a room become a single tree.

Reading the picture

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Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Follow the trunk as it swings around in the middle and shoots off to the right. The thick trunk turns almost at a right angle and lies sideways. Long, pale brushstrokes slide along the bark, and moss drawn as little round outlines clings here and there. Thin branches cross over the heavy trunk and burst into white flowers.
Zoom in on the gap between the upper branches. White blossoms sit on the dark wood, while pale violet and pink ones open against the gold. Every flower has red sepals, and small round buds are dotted along the twigs. Plum is one of the first trees to bloom at the end of winter, and here it flowers again on very old wood.
Look at the far right panel. Broken trunks rise in jagged points, as angular as posts carved with a knife. Even between these broken stumps, new branches reach out and bloom.
Move to the far left. A small tree with red flowers stands beside a flat rock. Behind it, the gold ground shows the seams of square sheets of gold leaf, laid side by side like a checkerboard.
Find the round fitting just beside the spot where the two middle doors meet. Inside a petal-shaped rim is a diamond pattern. This is the handle you hook a finger into to slide the door open or shut. It is proof that this was not a picture hung on a wall but a real door people used.

When it was painted

In 1646, Kano Sansetsu was about fifty-six and working in Kyoto. He had trained under the painter Kano Sanraku, married his teacher's daughter, and inherited the family studio. By then the heart of the Kano school had moved east to Edo, the new seat of power. Sansetsu stayed behind as head of the Kyoto branch.

That year he was asked to paint the rooms of Tenshōin, a small subtemple of Myōshinji, one of Kyoto's great Zen monasteries. These four doors once formed one wall of a room there. Another set of doors he painted for the same building in the same year, showing Daoist immortals, is now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Paintings made for one building ended up in two American cities.

The doors did not stay at the temple. According to the Met, they were sold to a private collector in the 1880s and were later trimmed along the top. They became part of the Japanese art collection of the American collector Harry G. C. Packard, and came to the museum with that collection in 1975.

When the Met built a Japanese reception room, the Shoin Room, in its galleries, the back wall was sized to fit Old Plum. The temple doors became the wall of a room once again. Sansetsu died in 1651, five years after painting these doors.

Now look again. The main trunk crosses from one door into the next, and in a few places it runs right off the top edge. Once you know the top was cut away, those vanishing branches make you wonder how high the old tree really climbed.

The painter

Kano Sansetsu

1590–1651

When painting this, the artist was about 56 years old

All paintings by Kano Sansetsu →

Old Plum

Questions to think about

Look for itCan you find the broken trunks and the new branches growing on this plum tree?
Why?Why do you think Sansetsu chose an old, sharply bent and broken tree instead of a straight young one?
What about you?Like an old tree that still blooms, what can older people in our society bring to flower, and what gets in their way?

Same period