Houses in Nara

Houses in Nara (奈良の家), painted by Hayami Gyoshū in 1927 in color on paper, is a hanging scroll in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and forms a pair with the artist's contemporaneous Houses in Kyoto. Where the Kyoto scroll concentrates on the dense rhythm of Kyoto machiya, the Nara scroll opens onto a quieter, lower-density configuration: a small grouping of tiled-roof houses set against the gentle topography of the old Yamato capital. Gyoshū's drawing is again precise — every tile course, eave, and lintel rendered with attention — and his palette is restrained, dominated by soft ochres, muted blues, and the warm gray of weathered plaster. The choice of paper ground rather than silk and the matte surface of his mineral pigments give the work a deliberately archaic, almost archaeological feeling, in keeping with Nara's status as the cradle of classical Japanese culture. The painting belongs to the same productive late-1920s period that produced Emerald Mosses and Verdant Grass (1928) and Camellia Petals Scattering (1929), and it demonstrates that Gyoshū's late vocabulary embraced architectural subject matter as fully as it embraced fire, flowers, and gold ground. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, preserves the work as part of its core holding of early Shōwa nihonga, and for students of Hayami Gyoshū it offers a quietly authoritative example of his ability to apply the disciplines of nihonga to the careful documentation of Japan's old capitals.