The Lords Of the Brush

These screens, says Price, recall an old duality. Crows suggest the sun in Japanese tradition, while rabbits evoke the moon.

"Where you see the man in the moon," he says, "the Japanese see a rabbit. My wife has been trying to show it to me for the past 40 years."

Rabbits don't climb up pine trees. But the moon does. Very slowly the room darkens. This is not an optical illusion. The lighting has been programmed. The darker it gets, the more the rabbit's whiteness glows. Stable, bright museum light does no favors to such pictures, which were painted to be seen, says Price, by candlelight or charcoal light or sunshine cooled and softened by translucent paper walls.

Price is 77, and enthusiastic. His eyes sparkle. His hair is shoulder-length and gray.

"Edo" is a fluid term. The word signifies a place -- the city now called Tokyo -- and a new ebullient style and 2 1/2 centuries, the period that began in 1615 when Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) became, beneath the emperor, the absolute ruler of Japan.

Much changed during the shogunate. A sort of peace prevailed. The samurai, required now to leave their country castles and attend their lord in Edo, became increasingly exquisite. The merchant classes prospered, and became exquisite, too. The decorative arts -- embroidery, ceramics, woodworking and lacquer work, cookery and perfumery -- flourished with prosperity, as did gift-giving and dressing up and generally showing off. One Edo cookbook illustrates 55 different ways to cut and display carp.

Hierarchical Japan respects its noble past. Old traditions were not broken in the Edo era -- in Japan that wasn't done -- but they were stretched.

Glowering on the wall is the ferocious monk Daruma, the legendary founder of the discipline of Zen. His eyes bulge. His brow is furrowed, his chest hairy. He's furious. Similarly intense are the coarse, impatient brush strokes of his gold-embroidered robe. Daruma dares the viewer to conquer self-deception. But it's hard to take him seriously. Paintings of this sort were once religious objects. This one is a party piece. According to the wooden box in which this scroll is stored, it was painted at a banquet by Kawanabe Kyosai, a slightly comic painter invited to the dinner to entertain the guests.

Samurai aren't funny, nor are geisha, nor are fish. But Joe Price often smiles as he proceeds through his show and explains its painted jokes. In an early Edo hanging scroll by Watanabe Shiko (1683-1755), a carp swims up a waterfall, something those bottom-dwelling, sluggish fish are not known to do. "It is said," says Price, "that a carp who ascends a waterfall becomes a dragon." The picture's true subject isn't wildlife, it's social climbing. The striving fish is gasping; he has a long, long way to go.

Nearby, a focused monkey -- by Mori Sosen (1747-1821) -- attempts to catch a wasp. This image, explains Price, spins a complex pun: The words for "wasp" and "fiefdom" (hachi and hochi) rhyme, as do the ideograms for "monkey" and "lord." Should your lord grant you a fiefdom, look out, you might be stung.

That not everyone will get the joke doesn't really matter. What makes the work a marvel is the monkey's painted fur. Sosen painted monkeys so often, and so wondrously, that his contemporaries thought he must be a reincarnation of a Japanese macaque.

Such shifts of focus happen often. You stop thinking about subjects, about waterfalls or wasps, and find yourself astounded time and time again by the markings of a brush -- by the elegant striations of Suzuki Kiitsu's clamshells, or the pooling grays and copper greens of those poppy stems in grass.

Price doesn't know who painted them. No one does. He bought the painting anyway. It brought pleasure to his eye.

"It is good to see it here. When I first began collecting, I'd find my way to Washington, to the Freer Gallery, where they'd take me to the basement and into the storage rooms and show me Edo painting. I remember my wonderment," he says.