Wind God and Thunder God

Some seventy years before Ogata Korin took up this subject, an earlier Kyoto painter, Tawaraya Sotatsu, had set the wind god and the thunder god on a pair of gold screens. Korin, working around 1700, copied that composition closely, almost as an act of homage across the generations. This is how the Rinpa style was handed down, by later masters studying and repainting the works of the founders. On the right, Fujin, the wind god, strides across the gold clouds with his bag of winds slung over his shoulders. On the left, Raijin, the thunder god, rides his ring of drums. The gold ground gives them nothing to stand on but empty sky. Much later the painter Sakai Hoitsu decorated the reverse of these very screens.