Vintage Japanese Four Panel Byobu Table Screen, Signed, c. 1950–1980

The Piece

A four panel Japanese folding screen, a byobu, in the low table format made to stand behind an arrangement or along the back of a chest rather than to divide a room. Each panel is silk laid over a light board core, mounted in a dark lacquered frame the colour of old rosewood, and finished at the corners and hinges with pierced brass mounts cut in a scrolling leaf pattern.

The painting runs across all four panels as one composition rather than four separate pictures, which is the whole logic of the form. A flowering branch enters at the left with broad blue green leaves and opens into trumpets of orange and vermilion, then thins across the centre into a long trailing spray of white five petalled blossom, buds still closed in coral at the tips, before running out into empty ground at the right. The silk is washed in a warm gold that deepens toward the centre of each panel, and the painter has left better than a third of the surface bare, which is what gives the branch its movement.

Each panel is framed in a band of cream silk brocade woven with a faint figured pattern, and the whole is bordered again in a narrow paper edge. At the lower right, in black ink, are two characters reading Tokumai, with a small red relief seal stamped beneath them.

History & Provenance

The byobu is among the oldest continuous forms in Japanese interiors, recorded from the eighth century and developed through the Muromachi and Edo periods into the gold ground screens that are the best known surviving examples. The construction has changed remarkably little: panels of paper or silk over a light lattice core, hinged with paper strips or with metal fittings, so the whole folds flat and travels.

The low four panel format of this screen belongs to the domestic tradition rather than the ceremonial one. Screens of this height were made to sit on a chest, behind a flower arrangement, or at the head of bedding, giving a painted ground to an object placed in front of them. The subject follows the bird and flower convention, kachoga, in which a single seasonal branch is asked to carry the whole picture.

The signature is the part a buyer will want to pursue. The two characters read most naturally as Tokumai, and the seal beneath is a carved relief stamp of the kind a painter used alongside a brushed signature rather than a workshop mark. No atelier label or box is present. The screen is offered as signed and hand painted, with the reading of the name given as the best available and not as a firm attribution, and there is room here for someone who reads the seal to know more than this listing does.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A low screen does something no framed picture can: it stands on its own, it turns a corner, and it makes a background wherever you put it. Set it on a sideboard behind a bowl, on a hall table, on the floor at the end of a bed. The gold ground throws light back into a dark room, and because the branch runs across all four panels you can change the whole composition just by adjusting the angle of the folds. The empty ground is as considered as the painted part, and that is the difference between a decorative screen and one made by somebody who knew what they were leaving out.