Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan

Warning: this book is written by a highly respected academic, and makes for a difficult read. Part of the problem is his overly dense writing style and tendancy to use the most obscure descriptive words, that don't illuninate the text, but can make it often inpenatrable, for all but the scolar, specifically studying this area. Yukio Lippit is a well regarded Professor of Japanese Art History at Harvard, and often contributes essays to exhibition catalogues. Even as a fairly advance scholar, I found this book a very slow read, and at the end, was not really sure of what his point was.

Great lecturers do not always write as well as they speak. Lippit just soars with his talks,slides and now this book. One our current great teachers. Live long and be well.

狩野派が江戸時代にかくこたるアカデミー流はとなれた指導者狩野探幽の勉強には貴重な書です。