A six-panel folding gold-leaf screen featuring paintings of eighteen fan-shaped cartouches. They are finely painted in ink and mineral colors with a decor of flowers, animals, and human figures. Most fans are painted in the wide range of painting styles known to the Japanese art world of the nineteenth century, and some in the styles of individual famous painters.

The cartouches are painted in the styles of: Rimpa school (first panel, top), Kano school ink landscape (second panel, bottom), Itō Jakuchu (fourth panel, top), Akita Ranga (sixth panel, top), Muromachi-period Zen paintings (fifth and sixth panels, top and bottom), Genroku-period machi-eshi painters (third panel, bottom), Chinese nature studies (fifth panel, bottom), Sumiyoshi school (second
panel, top), Tosa Genji-e (third panel, top), Soga school (first panel, bottom), Hanabusa Itchô (sixth panel, middle), Kano-school ink paintings (fourth and fifth panels, middle and bottom), Nōgaku paintings (first panel, middle), and Kano school polychrome nature studies (second and fourth panels, middle).

Born in Edo, Toshinobu was educated as a Kano artist by his father Kano Hakuju Yukinobu 狩野伯壽行信. His artist names were: Sosen 素川, Chô'onsai 潮音斎, Chô'onsai 朝音斎, Sanryô 三龍. He followed his father and became the ninth and last generation to head the Saruyamachi 猿屋町 school of Kano painters. He also served as the last official painter to the Shogunate, the goyō eshi 御用絵師, before the abolition of the Shogunate in 1867; a position that gave him access to the large painting collection housed in Edo Castle.

He was well known, not only as an excellent painter, but also as a leading authority on Japanese painting and successfully weathered the difficult transition between the Edo and Meiji periods. Toshinobu became a famous artist in the new regime, and authored in 1893, together with the calligraphy connoisseur Kohitsu Ryōetsu 古筆了悦, the Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Painters, the leading reference book on Japanese painting during his lifetime. The following year, the pair published the Seals of Japanese Painters, which likewise established them as the leading painting experts of their time.

It is possible to trace both of these abilities - those of the famous painting connoisseur and the noted artist - within this screen. His encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese painting can be seen in the way he quotes the painting traditions of different schools and artists at different historical periods. We also see his great artistic abilities in the way he adapts and applies the salient characteristics of myriad painting traditions onto the fan cartouches on this screen. In a sense, the screen becomes an encyclopedia of Japanese paintings, created by one of its great connoisseurs, a leading painter who was educated within the very traditions that he depicts.

Another major work, a pair of screens depicting the Tale of Tsurezuregusa, is in the Itabashi Art Museum in Tokyo, and was exhibited in their major exhibition of Kano painters in 2006, The Paintings of the Kano School (Kano-ha zen zuroku; 狩野派全図録) and are illustrated and described in their catalog. These published screens bear the same seals as the present work, and can be seen in a close-up on page 146 of the same catalog.