| 介绍（英） | In this sixteenth-century Japanese folding fan, a group of Chinese boys have broken into play in the middle of their calligraphy lesson. Writing utensils are scattered around the space—brushes, brush rests, inkstones, books, scrolls, and silk wrapping cloths. While one of the boys naps in the center of the composition, the others form a circle around him, armed with brushes dipped in ink. One has already begun making marks on his forehead. Two others, at lower left and lower center, inch their wet brushes closer to the sleeping boy’s face. The condition of the boy at center suggests the extent of the boys’ shenanigans—his pants are pulled down enough to expose his backside, with a pronounced dark smear between his buttocks. At right, while one boy leaps with joy at the sight of his classmates’ mischief-making, another cowers behind him, his line of sight redirecting attention back to the ebullient central group. Although it is currently mounted as a hanging scroll, the pronounced radial creases across the surface suggest that it was originally mounted on bamboo ribs and used as a folding fan.
Paintings and decorative objects featuring boys at play were first introduced to Japan from China in the early medieval period. These highly auspicious images celebrating fecundity and an abundance of male heirs, tend to show boys playing sports and games while also playfully performing adult roles, indications of their futures as upstanding gentlemen. Such pictures appear to have been a specialty of the early Kano school, which rose to prominence at the turn of the sixteenth century. Painted fans were a Kano mainstay. This fan painting is among the earliest extant Kano school paintings of this subject, which began to appear on fans and other small-scale painting formats during Motonobu’s generation. In the next generation and throughout the Edo period, Kano painters took up the theme for even large-scale paintings, including paired folding screens and suites of panel paintings. |