In its broadest sense this book is about the relationship between topography and the language of visual symbols a painter manipulates, or must invent, to suggest specific places. How do artists communicate identifiable localities in paintings? What meanings are encoded in topographical paintings? What do such pictures tell us about artist, audience, and society? What do these paintings reveal about deeply felt cultural attitudes about place? This book is also about a central moment in Japanese painting. The middle decades of the eighteenth centruy were a time of enormous creative energy and...

Through individual case studies involving the professions of sculptor, painter, potter, printmaker, and architect, this book addresses the question about what it meant to be an artist in Japan from the seventh century to the twentieth. How did artists go about their business? What degree of control did they exercise over their metier? How were they viewed by society? How was the image of the artist fashioned in various periods? Throughout much of Japan's past, artists' thoughts about their activities have remained unrecorded. Some of the essays in this volume reveal how the machine of...