Summer Evening

Summer Evening (夏夕, Natsu Yū) is a 1941 hanging-scroll painting by Hashimoto Kansetsu in ink and color on silk, in the collection of the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane. Painted in the second-to-last full year of the artist's life, the painting belongs to the body of late seasonal landscape work that Kansetsu pursued through the late 1930s and early 1940s. The title natsu yū refers to the long, slow evenings of midsummer, when the heat of the day finally relents and dusk extends into a prolonged blue hour — a classical seasonal motif in Japanese poetry. Kansetsu's treatment uses the spare composition and atmospheric ink wash of his mature nihonga manner to evoke the quality of the air at this time of year rather than to itemize specific subjects. The painting is among the late Kansetsu works in the Adachi Museum, which holds one of the most important institutional collections of his work.