Rough Waves

The seal on this two-panel screen reads Dōsū, a name Ogata Kōrin took in 1704, which places it in the few years he spent in Edo, today's Tokyo, away from his native Kyoto and its court taste. He gave the sea an almost living menace here. The crests curl into long clawed fingers of foam, outlined with two brushes held together in one hand, so the water reads like the talons of a dragon. The idea was not wholly his own. He was looking back at wave paintings by Sesson Shūkei, a monk-painter of the previous century. Kōrin's name now labels a whole school of design, Rinpa, a word coined from the second half of it long after he died.