Shoreline at Dusk

Shoreline at Dusk (Yūgure no kaihen) is a pair of large folding screens of 1910 by Furuya Kōrin (1875-1910), each panel approximately 178.5 × 370 cm, published in Impressions, the journal of the Japanese Art Society of America, in issue 34 (2013). The screens are among the very few major painted works to survive from Furuya's brief career — completed in the year of his death at age thirty-five — and document the side of his practice that operated alongside the pattern albums for which he is now best known. The composition extends the visual language of the Kōrin moyō and Shasei sōka moyō pattern books into the format of the large painted screen: a long horizontal beach line treated decoratively, with low waves, scattered grasses, and an evening sky organized in the flat, stylized neo-Rinpa idiom that Furuya and his Kyoto circle had been advancing through the Unsōdō publishing programme. The screens make explicit the continuity that the printed pattern books only implied between Furuya's industrial-design work for the Kyoto kimono and lacquer trades and the older Rinpa tradition of decorative painting on screens and fans extending back to Ogata Kōrin and Tawaraya Sōtatsu — a continuity that explained Furuya's contemporary nickname as a 'Kōrin of the modern age'.