Zen monk Sesshū forged Japanese ink painting in Ming China
Sesshū Tōyō, about 1420 to 26 August 1506, trained as a Kyoto Zen monk under Tenshō Shūbun before a 1467–1470 Ming voyage remade his brush. Winter Landscape and seasonal scrolls made him the painter-priest later schools claimed as founder.
A legend from his boyhood at Hofukuji temple in Okayama says that when his teacher tied him to a post as punishment, Sesshū drew a mouse on the floor with his tears so lifelike that it came alive and chewed through the ropes. Born into the samurai Oda family in Akahama in Bitchū Province, he moved at 12 or 13 to Shōkoku-ji in Kyoto, a temple closely tied to the ruling Ashikaga, as an acolyte under Shunrin Shuto. There he studied for 20 years under Tenshō Shūbun, often called Japan's first great master of ink landscape, before leaving for a provincial temple in western Japan.
In 1467 a warrior clan that traded with Ming China sent him with a Japanese mission. For three years he travelled from Ningbo to Beijing, visiting Chan monasteries and studying the realistic work of professional painters rather than scholar-amateurs, and the scale of Chinese scenery changed his art. Back home he painted Winter Landscape in the 1470s, using only sumi ink thinned to greys: flat, overlapping mountains, a zigzag crack of line, and a lone traveller climbing toward a bare temple, dwarfed by the land in the spirit of mono no aware.
At 67 he painted the Four Landscape Scrolls of the Seasons, originally screen panels later mounted as hanging scrolls, in which the autumn scene borrows the Chinese device of several viewpoints. His rocks, drawn with a wet, split brush, have a rough, solid texture and a recurring trapezoid shape. In old age he studied Zen and laid out gardens in Masuda, and he died at 87 at Tokoji in 1506. His pupil Shutoku inherited his studio, Unkoku-an, many later schools named him their founder, and Japan's modern art historians canonised him from the late nineteenth century.
Source: Sesshū Tōyō
