Houses in Kyoto

Houses in Kyoto (京の家), painted by Hayami Gyoshū in 1927 in color on paper, is a hanging scroll in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and is one of a pair of cityscape paintings — together with the contemporaneous Houses in Nara — that document the artist's response to the historic urban fabric of the old capitals. The composition presents a closely observed view of traditional Kyoto town houses (machiya), with their characteristic tiled roofs, plaster walls, and narrow lanes treated as a flattened structural pattern rather than a perspectival vista. Gyoshū's mineral pigments are restrained to muted ochres, slate grays, and browns, and the surface depends on the exact placement of architectural lines on a paper ground with very little atmospheric softening. The work belongs to the same year as the artist's experiments with European and Middle Eastern subjects following his 1930 trip abroad's preparatory studies and shortly precedes the great Camellia Petals Scattering screens of 1929; it shows how Gyoshū could turn his disciplined observational vocabulary onto modern architectural subjects without abandoning the formal calm of nihonga. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, holds the scroll among its key modern Japanese paintings and pairs it with Houses in Nara to give a sustained reading of his late-1920s urban work. For students of Hayami Gyoshū, Houses in Kyoto demonstrates how he extended early Shōwa nihonga to the analytical depiction of city space, complementing his more famous flower, fire, and screen compositions.