Kano Sansetsu

This striking mid-17th century sliding-door painting, “Old Plum” (1646), is considered the iconic masterpiece and the crown jewel of the Kano paintings within the Harry G.C. Packard Collection of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art @metmuseum. A bold composition of a plum tree extends across a 485.5 cm expanse of radiant gold leaf on paper. Originally created by Kano Sansetsu, these panels were commissioned for Tenshō’in, a subtemple of the great Zen Buddhist monastery Myōshinji in Kyoto. In East Asian culture, the plum blossom—the first tree to bloom despite the bitter wintry cold—is a powerful symbol of resilience against a harsh political climate. The artwork exemplifies how Japanese artists transformed age-old continental pictorial themes through abstraction and stylisation into a monument of nature painting. The painting was eventually acquired by the American collector Harry Packard, whose connoisseurship was instrumental in assembling the collection before it was sold…