Cypress Trees

In the paper of Kanō Eitoku's Cypress Trees screen, faint vertical marks are visible where door pulls once sat. Eitoku did not paint this as a folding screen. He painted it as a set of sliding doors for the Hachijōnomiya residence in Kyoto, completed in the twelfth month of 1590. The doors were later removed from the vanished building and remounted as this folding screen. The traces are what survives of the room. Eitoku painted for warlords in gold and dark colour so that dim castle rooms would seem lit from within. Most of his work burned when the castles burned. This one did not. Now at Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo @tokyonationalmuseum