Rocks at the Sea

Rocks at the Sea (Kaihen iwa) is a painting by Araki Kanpo depicting a rocky headland against the open sea, a subject that occupies the edges of the kachō-e (bird-and-flower) repertoire and that draws on the wider East Asian painting tradition of seascape (kaihen-zu) and isolated rock studies. Rocks at the sea — the kind of weathered headlands celebrated in the Noh play Takasago, in countless waka poems on Matsushima and Ise, and in the Edo-period decorative-arts vocabulary of the auspicious shore — carry strong associations of endurance, longevity, and the resilience of the natural world in the face of weather and time. Kanpo's painting renders the rock formations with the careful attention to surface, weathering, and structure that the Nanga (Southern School) tradition of his teacher Araki Kankai had taught him, and the open atmospheric distance of the sea behind them with the spatial habits he had developed during his decade as a Meiji-period oil painter under Kawakami Tōgai and Kunisawa Shinkurō. As a subject lying at the boundary between kachō-e and landscape, the painting demonstrates the range of Kanpo's pictorial vocabulary beyond the peacocks, cranes, and small birds for which he was most famous and shows him working in the kind of formal landscape mode expected of a senior Meiji nihonga painter.