Kaishien gaden 芥子園画伝

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Commentary by Tamaki Maeda

Posted December 3, 2017

First imported from China around 1700, Kaishien gaden (Ch: Jieziyuan hua zhuan, The mustard seed garden manual of painting), is an astoundingly long-selling, frequently reproduced book in Japan, its most recent version appearing in 2009. [1] The impact of the book on Edo-period artists is particularly well known. A tutorial manual for landscapes as well as bird-and-flower paintings, The Mustard Seed Garden presents a range of pictorial motifs, compositional models, brush techniques, coloring examples, and even samples of poetic inscriptions. The book also offers synopses of painting theories. The Mustard Seed Garden played vital role in spreading literati painting (bunjinga 文人画), traditionally an art of the scholarly elite, to affluent commoners in China, and to Sinophile intellectuals in Japan.

The “Mustard Seed Garden” refers to a villa in Nanjing owned by the essayist Li Yu 李漁 (Li Liweng 李笠翁, 1611–ca. 1680), who wrote the preface, dated 1679, for the first edition of the book. The Mustard Seed Garden has three parts. The first edition presents part 1 in five volumes, offering tutorial materials for landscapes based on Li Liufang’s 李流芳 (1575–1629) album, as adapted and expanded by Wang Gai 王槩 (Wang Anjie 王安節, ca. 1662–1722). A second edition was released in 1701; edited by Wang and his brothers Wang Shi 王蓍 and Wang Nie 王臬, it had two additional parts. Part 2 has four volumes, focusing on orchid, bamboo, plum, and chrysanthemum. Part 3 also has four volumes, dealing with insects, birds, and various plants. It should be noted that The Mustard Seed Garden was so popular that at least two different versions of part 4 were later released, but the Wang brothers were not involved in these productions. Scholars today generally consider parts 1, 2, and 3 together as the complete work of the original Mustard Seed Garden.

Exquisitely produced, the 1748 Kaishien gaden in the Pulverer collectionis the first Japanese edition of The Mustard Seed Garden; it is praised by specialists as the highest quality among the Japanese specimens.[2] The Pulverer copy is a rare complete set of six volumes. The first four volumes reproduce selected leaves from part 3 of the Chinese original, and focus on insects, birds, and plants. The last two, from part 1, deal with figures, animals, birds, buildings, and furniture. As in China, The Mustard Seed Garden was one of the earliest publications in Japan to include multicolored woodblock-printed images, and it predates the appearance of “brocade pictures” (nishiki-e 錦絵, full-color woodblock prints) in the 1760s. Delicately executed polychrome bird-and-flower compositions in volumes 3 and 4 are especially compelling, inspiring elegant privately commissioned prints (surimono 摺物) as well as illustrations for kyōka 狂歌 and haikai 俳諧 poetry albums. The publisher Kawanami Shirōemon (Kawanamirō 河南楼) made considerable effort to make the book resemble the Chinese predecessor, including the use of an oversized format and light-weight paper with a white sheen. [3] Some images in this edition are missing from later Chinese versions, making it an important research material not only for the visual culture of Edo period, but also the long publication history of The Mustard Seed Garden. [4]

Selected readings:
A. K’ai-ming Ch’iu, “The Chieh Tzu Yüan Hua Chuan (Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual): Early Editions in American Collections,” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America 5 (1951), 55–69.

Thomas G. Ebrey, “Printing to Perfection: The Color-Picture Album,” in The Printed Image in China: From the 8th to the 21st Centuries, ed. Clarissa von Spee (London: British Museum, 2010), 26–35.

Mai-mai Sze, trans./ed., The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (1956; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

Nakamachi Keiko 仲町啓子, “Kaishien gaden no wakoku o megutte” 「芥子園画伝の和刻をめぐって」, Bessatsu nenpō 10『別冊年報 10』(2006), 21–47.

Tsuruta Takeyoshi 鶴田武良, “‘Kaishien gaden’ ni tsuite: sono seiritsu to Edo gadan e no eikyō” 「『芥子園画伝』について: その成立と江戸画壇への影響」, Bijutsu kenkyū 283『美術研究 283』(1972), 1–12.

Copies in other collections:

British Museum, London

Chiba City Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Saga Prefectural Library

Spencer Collection, New York Public Library

[1] For the date of the first importation from China, see Tsuruta 1972, 7. The latest version is a reproduction of Jieziyuan hua zhuan in the collection of the Tōkyū Memorial Archive, published from Bensei Shuppan in 2009.

[2] For this and other versions of Japanese reprint of the Mustard Seed Garden, see Nakamachi 2006.

[3] Despite the resemblances, there is one distinctive difference between the Chinese and Japanese versions, which is black boarders framing images in the latter. See Ebrey 2010, 34–35.

[4] For example, compare this version with the 1887–1888 lithograph version reproduced in Sze 1978.