Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan by Timon Screech (review)

Obtaining Images is a wide-ranging synthetic analysis of Edo-period art. Few authors have offered as much integrated commentary on Edo images and engaged with as many significant issues as Timon Screech has in this volume. The author seeks to explore the purposes of Edo pictorial art—mainly paintings and prints—in terms of production, acquisition, display, and visibility. The book’s title derives from two senses of the word “obtain”—to acquire and to have validity—both of which figure into Screech’s consideration of his subject.

In his introduction, Screech lays out the book’s methodological strategy, explaining that he has left aside connoisseurship—“being the author does not give me the right to ventilate my aesthetic priorities” (p. 10)—and avoided a chronological “march through the decades” of masterpieces (p. 11). Instead, his aim has been to uncover what the objects he examines are really about and how, in their time, they were judged to be valuable. Screech does not completely overlook chronology, however; in later chapters he clarifies how stylistic tendencies and aesthetic assessments changed over the course of the Edo period.

Reading this book is a bit like seeing a familiar landscape in a fresh, new light. I appreciate Screech’s unfaltering curiosity and robust energy, although at times I find myself unable to agree with his conclusions. I would not, for instance, identify art by Itō Jakuchū and the Eccentrics as a “branch of literati painting” (p. 260). I concur that the Eccentrics were “ex centric, off-centred, rotating in a separate orbit” (p. 261)—and I so enjoy Screech’s description!—but I doubt that our understanding of Jakuchū’s work is augmented by its being grouped with literati painting. Nevertheless, I commend the author for his willingness to take innovative approaches.

In his first chapter, Screech explores legends about artists and takes up traditional concepts of creativity, copying, and artistic labor. Pages are peppered with intriguing tales. Notable are legends about the Tang-dynasty master Wu Daozi, whose paintings of dragons were considered mysteries, and stories about the Muromachi-period ink painter Sesshū, whose skills were said to be innate. Clarification would have been appreciated near the end of the chapter, where Screech contends that hawks—standing in for the loyal military retainer who is “trained, controlled and awaiting orders”—are invariably shown tethered (p. 30). Screech illustrates as an anomalous case the painting of a flying “dream hawk,” a bird seen by the artist in a dream (plate 10). In fact, numerous Edo-period paintings feature hawks flying free in the wilds, chasing prey, or simply sitting on tree limbs.

In Chapter 2, Screech deals with auspicious images, relating that the main function of Edo-period art was to bestow felicitation by celebrating nature and culture. We could debate whether imparting felicitation was fundamental to Edo art, but, hyperbole aside, it is unquestionably true that many works were meant to “produce a climate of well-being” (p. 35). The author also discusses literary and artistic expression more broadly, explaining, for example, that when people in Edo Japan “had an emotion they desired to communicate, or if they just wanted to hone their poetic skills, they did so via a previously recognized gambit, enmeshing their feeling into a history of sentiment associated with a given place. … Paintings that capture ‘famous places’ are, therefore, seasonal paintings, but also literary ones” (p. 63).

In his third chapter, Screech addresses cases of buying and selling, including little-studied modes of acquiring artworks. After surveying the main formats of painting and their materiality, he presents cases of pricing, ordering, receiving, and losing pieces. Interesting is his handling of puns and remarks made by artists about the cost of their paintings.

Chapter 4, entitled “The Power of the Image,” considers the religious art of the Edo period, which Screech contends means Buddhist art. Shinto, on the other hand, was “largely a sub-section of Buddhism” (p...