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The Rinpa (also romanized as Rimpa) artists produced paintings, calligraphy, ceramics, and lacquerware that expressed the indigenous aesthetic of vivid colors and bold, decorative patterning. Standing apart from the artists who decorated the castles of the feudal barons, they shared instead the artistic ideals cultivated at court by members of the imperial family, who felt a deep nostalgia for Japan's native traditions. As thematic material, they preferred stories drawn from medieval literature to the more banal symbols of wealth and power. Rejecting, too, the Chinese-inspired art of the Kano school, which valued ink monochrome, they developed a style rooted in the painting of the Late Heian and Kamakura periods.

Although the Rinpa artists did not, strictly speaking, constitute a school, the name Rinpa derives from the character for "school" (pa) and the second syllable of the name Korin, after Ogata Korin. Not in fact the originator of the tradition, Korin was a follower and later a rejuvenator of the ideals of Hon'ami Koetsu and Tawaraya Sotatsu, the two artists who forged the Rinpa style.

The Rinpa tradition continued through the Edo period, and it continues to be practiced today, with moderate success. Korin's followers settled in Edo, where many wealthy art patrons lived. One important result of this change in patronage was that later Rinpa artists usually chose as subjects straightforward depictions of nature—frequently flowers of the four seasons—and the subtle allusions to classical themes, which were the aesthetic basis of the art of Sotatsu and Koetsu, were largely forgotten.