The story
Hasegawa Tōhaku's Pine Trees is a pair of six-panel folding screens, painted around 1595, on which a grove of pines appears and fades in mist, done almost entirely in ink. It is a National Treasure, and like most paintings on paper at the Tokyo National Museum it goes on view only for short spells, to spare it from light. A small room in the main building is kept for one National Treasure at a time, so what a visitor meets there depends on the month.
The museum dates its beginning to an exhibition held in 1872 at the Yushima Seidō, a Confucian temple in Tokyo, and it is Japan's oldest national museum. Its first main hall in Ueno Park, by the British architect Josiah Conder, was badly damaged in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. The present Honkan by Watanabe Jin opened in 1938, a concrete building under a tiled Japanese roof, and the domed Hyōkeikan beside it, from 1909, is the oldest building on the grounds.
Other screens in the collection show how much it rests on these large gold and ink formats. Kanō Eitoku's Cypress Trees, a single twisting trunk spread across gold, began as sliding doors in a princely residence around 1590 and was later remounted as a folding screen. Ogata Kōrin's Wind God and Thunder God is his early 18th-century version of an older composition by Tawaraya Sōtatsu. On the back of Kōrin's screens the painter Sakai Hōitsu later added summer grasses bent by rain and autumn grasses tossed by wind, and since 1974 the two sides have been mounted separately.
