The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center—with leadership from John P. Murphy, The Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings, and collaboration with Kelly Reynolds, Head Registrar for Collections and Exhibitions—secured a grant from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation to support the conservation of a 17th century Japanese byōbu screen.

The six-panel tiger screen—which came into the collection in 1999 as a gift of Joan and Robert  Bernhard (Joan E. Mack, class of 1953)—is a rare work of cultural and historical significance, and a popular teaching object. Painted by Unkoku Toeki (1591-1644), an artist active during the late Momoyama and early Edo periods, it is a formal triumph showcasing the influence of Sesshu Toyo (1420-1506), the revered master of Japanese ink painting. The subject displays a powerful tiger perched alone on a cliff at the edge of a bamboo grove. The animal’s strength and energy—captured in bold, confident strokes of ink—pay homage to Toeki’s warrior patrons (daimyos), who identified with the tiger as a symbolic surrogate.

The screen was a key work in the Loeb’s 2017 exhibition, A Museum Menagerie: Highlights from the Permanent Collection.

Each semester a conference section of the popular survey course, Art 105: Introduction to Art History, is dedicated to the screen. The section involves close looking  exercises and formal analysis, supplemented by the early Chinese text, “Six Principles of Painting.” The goal of the section is to call attention to the painting’s formal qualities, place it in a historical context, and discuss how it represents contemporaneous theories of painting. Conserving the screen will ensure its continued use by students and faculty, while advancing the Loeb’s mission to support the College through the preservation of historically and culturally significant works of art.