Implicit in the idea of the "eccentric" painter is that the artist's style seems to have come out of nowhere, breaks all the conventions, and stands alone as an example of unparalleled individuality that cannot be repeated. All the better if the painter's biography is incomplete and prone to hyperbolic hearsay. Such narratives are largely fictive, and museums and the academic world as much as anyone else are prone to maintain them in their own ways, arguably because there is a pleasure in the tales told. The Miho Museum's spring show "Nagasawa Rosestu: The Fanciful Painter" is complicit in this, though it does bring some clarity to its subject. However, in its preciseness of the artist's achievements, it also reveals a murkier than ever overview.

Rosetsu (1754-1799) is posited, by and large, as the lesser of the well-known three Edo Period (1603-1868) eccentric painters, the other two being Soga Shohaku and Ito Jakuchu. Perhaps this is because his achievements failed to eclipse the more enduring and art-historically important ones of his teacher, Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795). As a student, and one of his distinctions was to become known among the 10 best disciples of Okyo, Rosetsu mastered the superlative realism of his teacher that combined the indefinite spatial articulations of traditional Japanese painting. "Peonies and Peacock" (18th century), for example, could easily have been painted by Okyo. The gist of the exhibition, however, is to situate Rosetsu in an antagonistic relation to his teacher.

Before 1786, when Rosetsu is believed to have been directed by Okyo to undertake commissions the master lacked time for, he used an authorial seal engraved with the kanji for "fish" (gyo). That same seal, which had a broken upper-right corner, has been found on works dating back to May 1792. Perhaps not a mere coincidence, the damaged seal was used at the time of Rosetsu's supposed stylistic break with his teacher.