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Genealogies have a deep history in Japan as tools for establishing political legitimacy and social standing. Japan’s political and military elite built patrilineal households, and familial continuity was valued such that heirless households regularly adopted sons to continue on their name. By the seventeenth century, if not earlier, Japanese artists, too, began organizing their workshops as households and created their own patrilineal genealogies in order to shore up their positions in elite art circles. Studies have shown how establishing multi-generational workshops or ex-post-facto genealogies added to the prestige of artistic traditions such as the Kanō school of painting and the Raku ceramics workshop.

This panel will contrast artistic legacies based on having been born, adopted, or trained within an artistic family or school with a different kind, namely self-created legacies wherein artists independently claimed to be formal inheritors of an earlier tradition, sometimes even after multi-generational gaps. Though this latter practice permeates Japanese art history, the phenomenon of non-related artists bestowing an art historical inheritance upon themselves or others is relatively understudied. Through case studies, the panelists will consider such practices as they existed in Japan in the eighteenth through early-twentieth centuries, with the aim of adding to the greater conversation around the role of tradition, inheritance, and branding in East Asian art and beyond.