Kanō Naganobu

Who They Were

Kanō Naganobu (狩野長信, かのう ながのぶ) was a Japanese painter of the Kanō school (狩野派, Kanō-ha), the hereditary workshop of painters that supplied the military rulers of Japan with screens, sliding-door panels and wall paintings for close to four centuries. He was born in 1577, in the fifth year of the Tenshō era (天正, Tenshō), and died on 26 December 1654. His working life therefore began in the Azuchi–Momoyama period (安土桃山時代, Azuchi–Momoyama jidai, 1573–1603), an age of civil war that ended with the unification of the country under a succession of three warlords, and continued through the first half-century of Tokugawa rule.

He was a son of Kanō Shōei (狩野松栄, Kanō Shōei), and the youngest brother of Kanō Eitoku (狩野永徳, Kanō Eitoku), the painter whose bold, gold-ground screens had made the family name synonymous with the taste of the unifiers Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. To be Eitoku's younger brother was to be born into the first rank of Japanese painting, but also to work permanently in the shadow of a famous sibling.

Life and Career

Naganobu trained inside the family workshop in Kyoto and took on commissions for the court and the aristocracy in the old capital, including work at the Imperial Palace. The Kanō school had held a quasi-official position as painters to the shoguns since the fifteenth century, and its members combined studio production — large numbers of screens and panels turned out by masters, assistants and pupils working together — with individual commissions from temples, nobles and warlords.

The decisive turn in Naganobu's career came with the rise of Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康, Tokugawa Ieyasu), who won the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and in 1603 was granted the title of shogun, establishing a military government that would last until 1868. Ieyasu set up his administration in Edo, a castle town on the Kantō plain that is now Tokyo, and the centre of political gravity moved east away from Kyoto. Naganobu was the first major Kanō painter to make that move. He is thought to have relocated before Ieyasu's death in 1616, possibly as early as 1605, and may have worked first at Ieyasu's castle in Sunpu Domain, in what is now Shizuoka.

In Edo he founded his own branch of the Kanō school and ran a workshop that held the formal title goyō eshi (御用絵師, goyō eshi), "painter in official service", meaning a studio retained by the Tokugawa shogunate to produce work for the government. The title carried stipends and obligations: the workshop painted the screens, ceilings and sliding doors of Edo Castle and of the shogunal residences, and its output was expected to project the authority of the regime.

Why They Matter

Naganobu's importance is geographical and institutional as much as artistic. For a century the Kanō school had been a Kyoto institution, tied to the imperial court and to the warlords who marched on it. By moving to Edo and taking service with the shogunate there, Naganobu carried the school's authority into the new capital and helped make it the official painting establishment of the Tokugawa order. The branch he founded became one of the several Kanō lines — the Kajibashi, Kobikichō and Nakabashi among them — that dominated official painting in Edo for generations.

His career also marks the moment when the Kanō workshop system proved it could transplant itself. The school's strength lay in training and reproduction: pupils learned by copying their masters, and a family branch could be planted in a new city and grow into a functioning studio. Naganobu's move is an early demonstration of that mechanism at work, and it set the pattern that later Kanō painters followed as the shogunate's building programme spread across the country.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 狩野長信, read かのう ながのぶ in kana, and romanised as Kanō Naganobu. The long vowel in the family name is usually marked with a macron; the name is sometimes written Kano Naganobu without it.

狩 (か, ka) — "hunt". This is the first character of 狩野, the family name. On its own the character means to hunt or a hunt, and it appears in words such as 狩猟 (しゅりょう, shuryō, hunting). In the surname it has no separate meaning; it is simply the first element of a name that, according to the school's own tradition, was taken from a place.

野 (の, no) — "field" or "open country". Together, 狩野 (かのう, Kanō) is the name of the painting school and of the family that ran it. Note that the second character is read の here, not its more common reading や.

長 (なが, naga) — "long". This character is common in personal names, where it often carries the sense of length, seniority or endurance. Its other frequent readings include ちょう (chō), as in 長所 (ちょうしょ, chōsho, a strong point), and おさ (osa), as in 長 (おさ, osa, a chief).

信 (のぶ, nobu) — "trust", "faith" or "believe". This is one of the most frequent closing elements in samurai and artisan personal names of the period; the same character ends the given names of Oda Nobunaga (織田信長) and of Naganobu's own father, Shōei, whose name is written 松栄 but whose line used 信 repeatedly. Its other common reading is しん (shin), as in 信仰 (しんこう, shinkō, religious faith).

Read as a whole, the given name 長信 (ながのぶ, Naganobu) combines "long" with "trust". The family name 狩野 identifies the painter as a member of the Kanō house, and in documents of the period a Kanō painter's surname alone was enough to signal his workshop affiliation.

Legacy

Naganobu died in Edo on 26 December 1654, having spent roughly half a century as a painter in the shogunate's service. The line he founded in Edo persisted among the Kanō branches that staffed the Tokugawa painting establishment, and the family name he shared with Eitoku remained the standard against which official painting in Japan was measured until the collapse of the shogunate in the nineteenth century.