Collection highlights tour

The 'golden age' of Japanese screen painting occurred in the 1600s in Kyoto, when these brilliantly realised screens were painted by Kano Eino, third generation head of the Kyoto Kano school. The style had emerged in the confidently flamboyant Momoyama period (1568-1615) as the brash and newly emergent samurai elite sought an ostentatious display of their own power and wealth. It was their patronage that created for the first time lavish screens of gold background decorated with symbols of power such as bamboo and cypress. The new style, expressed most beautifully by artists of the Kano school in the late 1500s and 1600s, was an intuitive distillation of the dialectic that has driven Japanese culture: its accepting/rejecting relationship with China. The dialectic (which the Japanese call 'wakan', 'China/Japan') was based on a series of opposites: monochrome/colour, emotion/restraint, abstraction/nationalism. The dialectic is epitomised in these screens: the bold, vigorous and rich brushstrokes of Chinese pai