Brewing Tea in the Shade of Trees

Brewing Tea in the Shade of Trees, dated 1825, is a hanging-scroll painting by Aoki Mokubei (青木木米, 1767-1833), held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession recorded at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/845160). Like its 1825 companion Preparing Tea by a Mountain Gorge, the sheet draws on the literati iconography of the scholar's tea practice — a subject of particular personal resonance for Mokubei, who in addition to his painting was the most accomplished sencha potter of his generation and a central material agent in the Kyoto bunjin revival of Chinese-style steeped-leaf tea. The composition belongs to a venerable lineage in Chinese painting: scholar-painters of the Ming and Qing repeatedly depicted the tea-making recluse in a shaded grove, a figure for the cultivated withdrawal from official life and for the refined, deliberately modest pleasures the literati ideal placed at the center of scholarly existence. The shaded-grove setting carries Tang and Song poetic associations of summer retirement and of the tea-poet Lu Yu's classic Cha Jing (Classic of Tea), one of the foundational documents of the entire East Asian tea culture and a touchstone for the Edo sencha movement. Mokubei was the friend and contemporary of Uragami Gyokudō (1745-1820) and Tanomura Chikuden (1777-1835), the two figures alongside him at the center of late-Edo bunjinga, and his self-trained painting practice was built from imported Ming and Qing scrolls and Chinese painting manuals as well as from the example of earlier Kyoto literati such as Ike no Taiga. The 1825 date places the sheet in his late period of fullest authority. The handling would carry his characteristic literati vocabulary: dotted moss and texture strokes on the trees, restrained color, small figures within an atmospheric scene. The Metropolitan source provides the firm attribution and date.