Tohaku　Hasegawa（1539-1610）was born in Nanao, Noto-no-kuni (present Ishikawa Pref.) and made his career as a painter in Noto and in Kyoto, specializing in Flower & Bird painting, genre painting and portraiture. Among his masterpieces are the painting Pine Grove in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum. In the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art’s paired screen painting Crows and Herons executed in sumi ink, Tohaku juxtaposes crows on the left-hand screen with white herons on the right-hand screen. Prior to this work, Tohaku had used the same crows and herons motif in the painting Crows on Pine and Egrets on Willow (c. 1593, Idemitsu Museum). In the Kawamura’s Crows and Herons, Tohaku paints violently brawling crows on the left screen and herons in peaceful repose on the right screen, thus contrasting black and white, motion and stillness, conflict and peace. Making skillful use of light and dark shades of ink in his depiction of the birds and foliage, we see Tohaku’s mastery of brushwork acquired from his study of Chinese painting.

Nanban screens are paintings depicting the arrival of nanban-jin (Portuguese and Spanish) in Japan. These screen paintings were created in large numbers in the Momoyama and early Edo periods of the late 16th to mid-17th centuries, of which approximately 90 works are known to be extant today. The Nanban screen in the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art is believed to be the remaining right-hand half of what was originally a pair of six-fold screens, of which the left-hand screen has been lost. The scene in this painting is one of the captain of a newly arrived Nanban ship landing with his entourage and a group of resident Christian missionaries coming to greet them. The sailors on the ship are of various skin colors and appearances and the captain and his attendants wear billowing trousers. The Nanban screens surely reflect the curiosity of the Japanese at the time concerning things foreign and longing for the exotic. Based on the contents depicted in the right- and left-hand screens, the Nanban screens created during this period are generally divided into several types. Regarding this classification, the screen in the collection of the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art shows strong similarities with the right-hand screens of the Nanban screen pairs in the collections of the Suntory Museum of Art (attributed to Sanraku Kano) and the Mitsui Memorial Museum, and is therefore presumed to be of the same type.

Kansetsu Hashimoto (1883-1945) was a painter who carried on the tradition of the Shijo Style of painting. His screen painting Song of the Lute in the Kawamura collection depicts a scene from a long narrative poem by the Tang period poet Bai Juyi (pseud. Bai Letian) also titled Song of the Lute. In this scene we see Bai Letian and his friend, who have encountered a woman at a boat landing on the Yangtse River, lured by the sound of her lute. When they ask her to play a piece, the sound she draws from her instrument moves them deeply, as if they are listening to the very voice of her soul. After playing she begins to tell her life story. "I was a famed lute player in the capital, and my youth and beauty brought me a life of pleasure and luxury. But with time my beauty faded and that life crumbled. Now I spend my nights dreaming of my younger days and shedding bitter tears." Hearing the woman’s story, Bai Letian can’t help but recall his own fall from grace after being drawn into a power struggle in the capital and eventually demoted to the provinces. To his ears, the strains of her lute were like celestial music and inspired him to write the narrative poem Song of the Lute, about her music and her story.

In Kansetsu’s painting we see the woman lute player in the left-hand screen together with Bai Letian, who leans forward as he listens intently to her story, and his friend. In the right-hand screen we see the boat that Bai Letian and his friend have come on and its old boatman. The surrounding river scene Kansetsu paints is full of elements that give a sense of the flow of the river and air, as well as the passage of time and the transient nature of people’s lives. This screen painting Song of the Lute is one of Kansetsu’s representative works and won him meritorious mention at the 4th Bunten exhibition in 1910.