Sesshū: The Master Painter Who Brought Chinese Styles to Japan

Sesshū (1420–ca. 1506) was a Japanese Zen monk and ink painting master. He was active around the same time as the Chinese Southern School painter Shen Zhou (1427–1509) and the Italian artist Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510). Amid the many works he produced in a variety of styles, his masterful late painting of Amanohashidate, completed with light brushstrokes like a preparatory sketch, gives a bird’s eye view of the picturesque sandbar whose name can be rendered as “Bridge to Heaven.”

Amanohashidatezu (Picture of Amanohashidate), a national treasure. (Courtesy Kyoto National Museum)

By contrast, the winter section of his Autumn and Winter Landscapes is a scene impossible in reality, semi-abstract in its overlapping rocks with strong outlines.

Shūtō sansuizu (Autumn and Winter Landscapes), a national treasure. Autumn is on the right and winter on the left. (Courtesy Tokyo National Museum)

Travel in China

Born in what is now Sōja in Okayama Prefecture, Sesshū was raised from a young age at the temple of Hōfukuji and became a monk. After traveling to Kyoto, he studied under another monk and painter called Shūbun at the major temple of Shōkokuji. While his talent was recognized to some extent, his rough, powerful style did not match the delicate tastes of Kyoto intellectuals. Feeling himself at an impasse, in his mid-thirties Sesshū took a position under the daimyō Ōuchi Masahiro, whose territories extended over today’s prefectures of Yamaguchi, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka. Masahiro was one of the country’s leading daimyō, and his control of the port city Hakata brought him huge profits from trade with China and Korea. Imports included expensive paintings and artworks known as karamono (literally, “Chinese goods”), which were quite different from the art that Sesshū had seen in Kyoto. As he studied from them, his admiration grew for their authenticity.

Masahiro valued Sesshū not only for his painting but also as one of his representatives. When Sesshū was in his forties, Masahiro chose him as an adviser to Keian Genju, a Zen priest who headed the Ōuchi delegation of a trade and diplomacy mission to China. The three arts of poetry, calligraphy, and painting were of central importance to cultured Chinese, and therefore essential to diplomacy and communication, whether as presents, part of entertainment, or to lighten the mood.

Another important job for Sesshū meant taking on the equivalent role of a photographer today, depicting the Chinese scenery and people’s appearance to convey back to Japan. He must also have selected Chinese paintings to bring home.

Sesshū made great progress as an artist over the years he spent in China. When the delegation had an audience with the emperor, there were always first-rate paintings on display, and he could experience many different styles when purchasing artworks. At that time, the Zhe school was in fashion; it was characterized by a rough, energetic style, and allowed for idiosyncratic use of space. This was a good fit for Sesshū’s talents, and he picked up techniques from the source like cotton soaking up water. His Landscapes of Four Seasons, completed as a commission while he was in China, has a tight composition that cannot be found in Japanese painting of the era. Sesshū was the only Japanese painter of his time to be recognized in China.

Spring (right) and summer (left) from Shiki sansuizu (Landscapes of Four Seasons). (Courtesy Tokyo National Museum)

Autumn (right) and winter (left) from Shiki sansuizu (Landscapes of Four Seasons). (Courtesy Tokyo National Museum)

At the same time, Sesshū mastered realistic sketching of scenery by studying Chinese artworks. His Picture Scroll of Chinese Scenes, painted on the way back from what is now called Beijing, is a work of high quality that conveys a sense of having faithfully reproduced the landscapes he saw on his travels.

Tōdo shōkei zukan (Picture Scroll of Chinese Scenes). (Courtesy Kyoto National Museum)

Developing His Style

While other artists went to China as part of delegations, they did not so consciously study and absorb the styles of painting they encountered. Some 26 years after returning to Japan, Sesshū was in his seventies when he wrote recollections on a landscape scroll, describing how he had learned artistic techniques from Li Zai in China and Shūbun in Japan. There are no similar long pieces written directly by other Japanese artists of the period.

Haboku sansuizu (Broken Ink Landscape), a national treasure. (Courtesy Tokyo National Museum)

As Sesshū writes in these reminiscences, while he adapted to Japan after his return, he also opened up his own artistic world. Like someone ordering a Cézanne-influenced work today, in Japan at that time, painters might be asked to create a work in the style of a particular popular Chinese artist, such as Xia Gui, a court painter active in the thirteenth century. Sesshū produced 12 paintings in the style of six famous Chinese artists, as we know from copies by painters in the Kanō school. It was a way of showing patrons what he could do, although he added his own individual touches, so it is clear from a glance that they are by Sesshū. His Autumn and Winter Landscapes and Broken Ink Landscape were developed based on pieces by Xia Gui and Yu Jian.

Copies by Kanō Tsunenobu of paintings by Sesshū. Names of the Chinese artists he was imitating appear in the bottom right of each, from left to right: Xia Gui, Liang Kai, and Yu Jian. (Courtesy Tokyo National Museum)

Growing Reputation

The era helped Sesshū rise to prominence. When he returned to Japan in 1469, the country was in the midst of the Ōnin War of 1467–77. Japan’s daimyō split into two armies, taking Kyoto as their battlefield, and the decade-plus of conflict became a major historic turning point. The daimyō who had previously lived in Kyoto, enjoying the capital’s culture, returned to their domains after the war was over, where they had to provide their own culture locally. This led to a number of regional “little Kyotos” arising. Yamaguchi was a classic example, and as its leading painter, Sesshū received many orders not only from the Ōuchi clan, but also from other samurai and monks, sometimes traveling to create artworks.

Notably, Sesshū went on a major trip in 1481 at Masahiro’s order, trekking from what is now Gifu Prefecture to the Noto Peninsula. He met with governors and other local leaders to convey Masahiro’s wishes and also communicated with monks to gather information. His stories of experiences in China and the ink paintings he created on his travels won admiration and his reputation spread. He also made sketches of the places he visited, and in providing both these and the information he gleaned, he was important as Masahiro’s “eyes and ears.”

Sesshū’s own style, unbound by his Chinese influences, began to be recognized. A work like Autumn and Winter Landscapes followed Xia Gui, but the brushstrokes and composition were all Sesshū’s own. A 16-meter scroll completed in his late sixties was a definitive example of Sesshū’s style. This monumental work, presented to Masahiro, is filled with every imaginable landscape motif as it depicts the passing of the four seasons. The scroll’s rendering of an idealized world and the eternal cycle of time even inspires a religious feeling transcending the laws of nature. While this is also based on a picture by Xia Gui, the rocks and trees are in the Chinese painter’s manner, but the landscape is original with Sesshū. It would later become a kind of “bible” for landscape paintings, and many artists would copy it.

Detail from Sansui chōkan (Long Landscape Scroll), a national treasure. (Courtesy Mohri Museum)

Building Originality

In his seventies, Sesshū painted Eka danpizu (Picture of Huike Cutting Off His Arm), based on a Buddhist legend. Although it is an ordinary ink painting, Bodhidharma’s clothes are rendered in dynamic brushstrokes with an unchanging thickness recalling that of a marker pen. In contemporary terms, the face has a graphic appeal, almost like that of a cartoon character. The picture takes inspiration from Minchō, another artist monk who was active in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with Sesshū incorporating his own “Zen” in a form of expression that transcends what is considered common sense in ink painting.

In his eighties, Sesshū traveled to Amanohashidate in what is now the north of Kyoto Prefecture; this was his last long “business trip.” His picture of what is traditionally considered to be one of Japan’s Three Scenic Views seems to be copied from nature, but there is actually no location from which it appears like this. Sesshū based his sketches on what he saw at ground level, creating a scene from an imaginary viewpoint. In some respects, it is very accurate; a similar landscape can be seen by helicopter today. While it is a common perspective today, among his Japanese contemporaries only Sesshū painted a bird’s eye view. This work also faithfully reproduces holy Buddhist and Shintō sites, and recalls Hanghzhou’s West Lake in China. In fusing Japanese and Chinese painting traditions, it can be seen as a culmination of Sesshū’s work in a different sense than his Long Landscape Scroll. After this, he returned to Yamaguchi, which was where he probably was when he died around 1506.

Sesshū’s genius lies in how he continued to construct new worlds rather than remaining in any particular style. Among his portraits, Picture of Plum Blossoms and Jurōjin, featuring one of the seven gods of fortune, has a strong Chinese atmosphere, while Portrait of Masuda Kanetaka is in the Japanese tradition, but with a greater realism. Yet he was not simply painting at a whim. While following the styles of his predecessors, he developed his own distinctive approach. This is in the East Asian tradition of both learning from the past and bringing forth new ideas, to slowly build toward originality. Sesshū succeeded brilliantly at doing so.

Baika jurōzu (Picture of Plum Blossoms and Jurōjin), at left (Courtesy Tokyo National Museum), and Masuda Kanetakazō (Portrait of Masuda Kanetaka) (Courtesy Sesshū Memorial Museum).

Sesshū was also highly influential on later Japanese painters, including those active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries like the Kyoto artist Hasegawa Tōhaku, who called himself Sesshū V, and Unkoku Tōgan, who started a school of painting in Yamaguchi. The Kanō school, which was backed by the Tokugawa shogunate to become dominant in Japanese art, revered Sesshū as the originator of Chinese-style painting in Japan, with Kanō Tan’yū in particular following him in ink painting. Indeed, no Japanese through history producing an ink painting landscape could possibly be unaware of Sesshū, who is rightly considered a gasei, a “saint of painting.”

(Originally published in Japanese on March 25, 2025. Banner image created based on Sesshū gazō [Portrait of Sesshū] by Tokuriki Zensetsu. Courtesy Tokyo National Museum.)