Hasegawa Tōhaku

In the Momoyama years, Japan's warlords wanted their new castles filled with gold — broad screens of bright colour on gold leaf, loud enough to match their power. Hasegawa Tōhaku painted for that world, yet the work that carries his name does the opposite. His pair of six-panel screens known as Pine Trees is almost empty: a grove of pines fading in and out of mist on plain paper, brushed in ink alone, with faint snow mountains barely showing at the edges.

Tōhaku came up from provincial Noto to the capital, Kyoto, and studied the older ink masters closely, above all Sesshū, the great 15th-century monk-painter whose fifth-generation heir he claimed to be. That set him against the Kanō school, the official painters of the ruling families, and for a time he took some of their commissions.

The Pine Trees screens have been a National Treasure since 1952 and hang in the Tokyo National Museum. No document fixes their date, but the loose, wet brushwork and the open spaces where the fog swallows the trees are what people still travel to see.