Rosetsu: Ferocious Brush

Accompanying a major exhibition on the 18th-century Japanese painter Nagasawa Rosetsu, this book features the artist’s most important paintings.

Born into the family of a low-ranking samurai, Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-1799) is renowned today as one of the most imaginative artists of early modern Japan. His visually stunning and highly idiosyncratic paintings earned him a place in Japan’s ＂Lineage of Eccentrics.＂ This book surveys Rosetsu’s art with sixty of his most important paintings, beginning with his earliest works in the realist mode of his teacher Maruyama Okyo, and ending with his haunting, visionary, and occasionally bizarre final masterpieces. Screen paintings, scrolls, and albums depicting Zen eccentrics, raucous children, ethereal beauties, otherworldly landscapes, and vivacious animals and birds take viewers on a journey through Rosetsu’s own travels and into his unbridled imagination.