Nanga

Nanga is an art movement. The gallery holds 147 works in this movement, including works by Sesson Shūkei, Genki and Soga Shōhaku. Browse Nanga paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Nanga (南画, "Southern painting"), also known as Bunjinga (文人画, "literati painting"), was a school of Japanese painting that flourished in the late Edo period (roughly the mid-18th to mid-19th century) among artists who styled themselves bunjin, or scholar-amateurs in the Chinese mold. Its name derives from the "Southern School" of Chinese painting theorized by the Ming critic Dong Qichang, which prized the expressive, self-cultivating amateur over the polished professional. The movement took root partly as a reaction against Japan's official isolation: Chinese woodblock painting manuals such as the *Mustard Seed Garden Manual*, imported texts, and the émigré monks of the Ōbaku Zen sect at Manpukuji (founded south of Kyoto in 1661) gave Japanese intellectuals access to continental models of poetry, calligraphy, Confucian learning, and ink painting, a study the Tokugawa shogunate actively encouraged.

Visually, Nanga is defined by monochrome ink with occasional pale washes of color, an emphasis on calligraphic, gestural brushwork over realistic finish, and subjects drawn largely from the Chinese repertoire—idealized mountain-and-water landscapes, bamboo, plum, and reclusive scholars. The aim was to capture the inner rhythm or spirit of a scene rather than its surface appearance, and paintings were frequently inscribed with poetry, uniting the "three perfections" of poetry, calligraphy, and painting on a single sheet.

The genre's founding masters were Ike no Taiga (1723–1776) and the poet-painter Yosa Buson, who together brought Bunjinga to maturity; their collaborative album *Jūben jūgichō* ("Ten Conveniences and Ten Pleasures," 1771) is canonical. Taiga's free, buoyant manner—seen in works such as *Fishing in Springtime*—broke from mere copying of Chinese prototypes. Later generations, including Uragami Gyokudō, Tani Bunchō, Aoki Mokubei, Tanomura Chikuden, the Confucian scholar-painter Kameda Bōsai, Okada Hankō, and Watanabe Kazan, increasingly blended continental sources with Japanese sensibility and, in Kazan's case, Western shading.

Nanga descends directly from Yuan-dynasty Chinese literati painting, its acknowledged ancestor, and developed alongside the related Nanpin school of Chinese-style bird-and-flower realism. Though its amateur ethos waned after the Meiji Restoration opened Japan to Western art, Nanga remains central to Japanese art history as the country's most thoroughgoing absorption of the Chinese scholar-painter ideal.