SAUNDERS, R. 2021. PLANTING EDO: PINUS THUNBERGII. ARNOLDIA, 78(3): 44-45 
Planting Edo: Pinus thunbergii 
Rachel Saunders 
n February 2020, we opened our largest ever 
exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, 
never anticipating that, a month later, the 
doors of the museums would close due to the 
pandemic. Painting Edo: Japanese Art from 
the Feinberg Collection features 120 paintings 
arranged as an immersive, in-person experience. 
At the onset of the closure, when I rushed about 
my office gathering books and papers, I expected 
to be away for only a few weeks, but as our exile 
from the galleries continued, we adapted to vir- 
tual close-looking through an online exhibi- 
tion and Zoom events. What I hadn’t realized 
was how significantly this new form of looking 
would alter my own vision of Edo painting. 
One work that I came to see differently was 
Old Pine by the eighteenth-century painter Ito 
Jakuchu. It is by no means a fresh observation 
that artists of the Edo period (1618-1868) were 
extremely interested in the natural world. 
Jakucht is celebrated today for the magical 
hyper-realism of his polychrome paintings of 
flowering plants, aquatic animals, and espe- 
cially chickens, which he is said to have kept 
so that he could observe the complexity of 
their feathers daily. Old Pine, by contrast, is 
executed in gestural monochrome ink. The 
painting is modestly sized, but the radical 
proximity from which the tree is painted—so 
close that it cannot be contained within the 
picture plane—makes an encounter with it 
feel as overwhelming as standing beneath an 
enormous conifer. 
Pines have a long history in East Asian art 
and are among the primary subjects of ink 
painting. In the vocabulary of this spare, highly 
intellectualized mode of painting, pines repre- 
sent resilience, longevity, and the integrity of 
the upright scholar-gentleman. Identification 
of a painted tree as “a pine” is all that is suf- 
ficient to trigger these associations, since ink 
painting valorizes capturing the essence of a 
thing over mere verisimilitude. Jakucht had 
clearly captured an individual arboreal essence, 
but it was not until a botanist’s eye was turned 
upon it that the true level of Jakucht’s observa- 
tion emerged. 
With Zoom, the distance between the painted 
plants in the galleries and their living counter- 
parts at the Arnold Arboretum melted away. 
This enabled a new privilege of simultaneously 
looking at living and painted plants with the 
Arboretum’s Michael Dosmann and Ned Fried- 
man. Our conversations led to a series of pub- 
lic virtual events. With this botanical view, 
the eccentrically angled branches, plated bark, 
and textured twigs of Jakucht’s “pine” resolve 
almost immediately into features of a “black 
pine,” or Pinus thunbergii (kuromatsu in Japan). 
When we view the painting, a major limb— 
covered, dragon-like, in scaled bark—thrusts up 
from the bottom left-hand corner, only to dis- 
appear beyond the right-hand border. It curves 
back into the frame at the top right, from where 
an angular branch, brushed in several switch- 
back strokes, descends. This dramatically con- 
torted form echoes the Japanese black pines 
growing at the Arnold Arboretum (see acces- 
sion 11371), and so, too, does the orientation of 
the painted needles: spiky lateral marks from a 
wide brush that flare from axial twigs. But the 
precision of Jakuchu’s observation is evident 
beyond these most prominent elements. A vari- 
ety of lichen-like dots peppers the branches, the 
largest pressed from the side of an inked brush, 
and the smaller nubby marks from its tip. What 
I had read as an anomalous abundance of moss- 
like texture strokes, Ned’s eye revealed as the 
closely observed characteristic texture of black 
pine twigs, formed by the unusual persistence 
of bracts, which can remain for up to two years 
after their sets of paired needles fall. 
In an inscription brushed in 1755, Jakucht 
wrote: “Flowers, birds, grasses, and insects 
each have their own innate spirit. Only after 
one has actually determined the true nature of 
this spirit through observation should painting 
begin.” Old Pine shows just how thoroughly 
Jakuchi took this dictate, not only in his obses- 
sively observed and painstakingly detailed poly- 
chrome paintings but also, we can now see, in 
the spare and immediate genre of ink painting. 
Rachel Saunders is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Curator 
of Asian Art at Harvard Art Museums. 
