The Kano school was not a single style so much as an institution — the most powerful, longest-lived, and most politically influential painting organization in Japanese history, dominating official artistic production from the late fifteenth century through the end of the Edo period in 1868, a span of nearly four hundred years during which successive generations of Kano painters served as official artists to the shogunate and produced the monumental screen and sliding door paintings that decorated the castles, palaces, and temples of Japan's ruling class. Founded by Kano Masanobu in the late fifteenth century and brought to its first great flowering by his son Kano Motonobu, the school achieved its synthesis by combining the ink brushwork and landscape vocabulary of Chinese Song and Yuan dynasty painting with the decorative color, gold leaf application, and native subject matter of the Yamato-e tradition — a fusion that produced a style of considerable formal power, capable of filling vast architectural spaces with compositions of monumental grandeur while retaining the refinement and allusive richness that Japanese aristocratic taste demanded. The school reached its most spectacular heights during the Momoyama period under Kano Eitoku, whose surviving screen paintings — bold, massive, gold-saturated compositions featuring ancient pines, eagles, and flowering trees rendered with a confidence bordering on aggression — defined the aesthetic of an era of military reunification and projected the power of its patrons with unmistakable visual force. As an institution the Kano school trained virtually every significant Japanese painter who sought official recognition for centuries, and even artists who eventually departed from its conventions — including several who would found the Rinpa tradition — received their foundational training within its workshops, making its influence on the totality of Japanese painting history almost impossible to overstate.