Pine Trees, Folding screen paintings in Tokyo National Museum, Japan
Pine Trees is a pair of six-panel folding screens by Hasegawa Tōhaku, each 156.8 by 356 cm, made of paper joined in vertical sheets with dark seams and bordered top and bottom by dull gold-brown fabric. In ink on aged tan paper, a tall dark-trunked pine stands at the left, lighter pines fade across the middle and right, and faint trunks sit low at the bottom center-right.
The screens bear no date; Tōhaku's style places them around 1593–95, after his Shōun-ji murals and the death of his son Kyūzō at 26. They became known only in 1932, were designated an Old National Treasure in 1934, and a National Treasure under the 1950 law on 22 November 1952. A near-identical version, the Moonlit Pine Grove screen, surfaced in 1997.
The two screens show pines in mist and use ink gradations to create depth and space without outlines or color. This technique follows the Zen tradition of reduction and lets the viewer experience the emptiness between the trees as part of the composition.
The screens are on view in the Japanese gallery at the museum, where lighting brings out the ink gradations. Visitors should allow time to observe the fine transitions and the effect of the paper from different angles.
Tōhaku used rough paper and straw brushes to develop a painting technique no one had employed this way before him. The work is considered the first large-scale painting to show only trees without additional landscape elements.
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