In pre-twentieth-century Japan, paintings were an essential component of the interior domestic environment. Any substantial home would include at least one room with a tokonoma alcove in which a hanging scroll might harmoniously share the space with a ceramic piece or basket. The arrangement was above all flexible, the choice of the easily changed hanging scroll expressing the householder's sensitivity to the seasons and to events of the moment. Paintings also enriched sliding screens (fusuma) that concealed storage areas or separated rooms, and folding screens (byobu) that created smaller spaces within a room. In the more intimate handscroll and album formats, paintings offered a chance for solitary perusal, interaction with friends, or even cultural instruction providing models for behavior. A new exhibition of scrolls and screens in Gallery C illuminates this everyday use of painting and the exquisite sensitivity to the moment that it represents. A highlight is a rarely exhibited screen depicting samurai on a falcon hunt as they make their way between rounded hills painted in intense malachite greens and curving rivers of deep blue, amidst villagers beating the reeds to raise the prey, ending with a procession bearing the catch to the manor house.
