The Price exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum is divided into five sections, each devoted to a specific area of painting. The first sets the stage with examples of "mainline" painters -- members of the Kano school (which, from the late 16th century to the late 19th century, combined Chinese academic ink painting with decorative elements) who were in the service of Imperial and shogunate courts and regional warlords. Early Kano painters were certainly technically proficient and inventive but, with the odd exception, toward the end of the Edo Period their followers were churning out yawn-inspiring, painting-by-numbers, derivative work. But fine early works are to be seen here, including a 16th-century screen of a pine tree, birds and a waterfall by Kano Motonobu (1476-1559) showing his synthesis of Chinese painting methods with a Japanese sensitivity and sense of atmosphere. A pair of screens by Kano Ryusetsu (1729-74) represents an emerging interest in genre painting -- the colorful world of everyday life -- with scenes of the Wakamiya Festival that has been held in the Nara Deer Park each December for more than 1,000 years.

The second section focuses on Kyoto painters, particularly Maruyama Oukyo (1733-95), founder of a school of followers who tried to emulate his naturalistic style of painting that was born of observing nature firsthand. A pair of screens showing a misty landscape demonstrates his mastery of line, with a wonderful use of gradated ink tones to conjure the damp haze. Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-99) was one of his most famous pupils -- aggressive and eccentric, he developed his own inimitable style with absolutely controlled brushwork and unorthodox composition. He died of poisoning at an early age -- whether self-administered or not is unclear -- and one wonders how his painting would have developed had he lived longer. One of a pair of six-panel screens shows a huge, kneeling bull -- parts of its bulk out of the frame -- and a small puppy nestled securely at its side. The other pictures an elephant, an animal that no Japanese at the time had probably ever seen, so large that parts of it also go off-frame.

The third section is devoted to eccentricity and includes works of the star of the show, Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800). The artist was famous for his ink paintings of roosters, the tails depicted with wild, calligraphic flourishes, and for an unprecedented approach to composition in exquisite works in color on silk. The first scroll that Price purchased will be there, as well as an outstanding color work of a rooster and hen, poised mid-step under flowering hydrangeas. A pair of screens depicting imaginary animals is startling in being so at odds with what we associate with Edo painting. Its composed of tiny squares of color, 43,000 on each screen, looking like pixels or mosaic.