Old Plum

The tree occupies a wall almost five metres wide. Its trunk rises at the right, turns sharply, and extends a long branch across the neighbouring panels. To imagine its original effect, picture entering a room. In 1646 Kano Sansetsu painted this plum for Tenshō’in, a temple within the Myōshinji complex in Kyoto.

Sansetsu belonged to the Kano school, whose workshops served military rulers, aristocrats, and temples. Their painters combined expressive ink work rooted in Chinese traditions with large coloured forms and gold. Such painting had to organise an entire interior. It needed to remain legible from across a room while offering discoveries at close range.

Broad bands within the dark trunk curve around knots and damaged bark. Greens and browns remain visible inside the nearly black silhouette, suggesting its irregular surface. At certain points the outline turns so abruptly that the eye pauses over the bend before continuing along the branch.

Near the right edge the trunk becomes almost horizontal before rising again. Broken offshoots retain sharp ends. Knots, splits, and broken branches make the tree’s age visible. Its enormous scale magnifies these features, making a small split in the bark a conspicuous element of the wall.

Small pale blossoms open among the broken branches. Plum flowers appear in early spring; the museum associates their flowering here with renewal. Sansetsu makes that relationship visible. Against the weight of the old trunk, each slender flowering shoot appears especially fragile. Scattered across several panels, the blossoms also help us follow the tree’s reach.

The low rock at the left leaves a broad field of gold above it. There is no familiar horizon or blue sky. Gold surrounds the branches above and below, making the distance to the tree difficult to measure while keeping its outline clear. At the left, broad gaps separate branches; at the right, several offshoots overlap.

The round metal handles recall the panels’ function. These are fusuma, doors that slide along tracks. Opening them shifted parts of the painting relative to one another. Their vertical divisions remain visible, yet the great branch crosses those divisions and joins the four separate surfaces.

A grid of small rectangles can be seen in the gold field: individual sheets of gold leaf. What appears to be a uniform background is a constructed surface bearing traces of handwork. The thin branches cross this grid freely, their uneven intervals especially apparent beside the regular joins of the gold sheets.

Today these panels are usually seen as one complete composition. In the temple their parts moved and divided adjacent rooms. Which view should count as primary: the closed wall or the changing arrangement of doors? The surviving painting raises that question without reproducing every condition of the original room.

The reverse of the doors depicted the Eight Daoist Immortals; those paintings are now in Minneapolis. The ensemble left the temple in the nineteenth century, and the panels were later trimmed at the top. The museum view preserves the painting but only partly conveys its former life in a room, where doors opened and people saw different sides of the same wall.