Visiting a Hermit

Visiting a Hermit (訪隠図, Hōin-zu) is a 1930 hanging-scroll painting by Hashimoto Kansetsu in ink and color on silk, in the collection of the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane. The subject belongs to a vast East Asian painting tradition descending from the Tang and Song periods: the literatus or scholar-official who travels into the mountains to seek an immortal or recluse, sometimes only to find an empty hut and a young attendant who reports that the master has gone gathering medicinal herbs. The motif crystallized in the Tang poet Jia Dao's celebrated quatrain on the failed visit to a hermit and was painted by generations of Chinese and Japanese literati artists. Kansetsu's treatment combines the classical figural composition with his characteristic atmospheric landscape, executed in the unhurried brush manner of his mature kanga style. The Adachi Museum is one of the great Japanese repositories of Taishō and Shōwa nihonga and holds the work as part of its core collection of Kansetsu paintings.