Mount Hiei

Mount Hiei (比叡山), painted by Hayami Gyoshū in 1920, is an early-career hanging scroll in color on silk now held by the Tokyo National Museum that already shows the disciplined observation and structural calm of his mature style. The composition depicts Mount Hiei, the wooded peak northeast of Kyoto whose Enryaku-ji temple complex has been one of the centers of Tendai Buddhism since the late eighth century. Gyoshū treats the mountain as a layered landscape — banded zones of forest cover, mist, and rising rock face — rather than as a religious symbol, and the soft mineral palette of cool greens and atmospheric grays is closer to early nihonga reform painting than to either Rinpa decoration or yōga oil painting. The work belongs to a moment in Gyoshū's career when he was a newly elected sub-member of the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute) and was experimenting widely with subject matter — landscapes of Kyoto, bird-and-flower compositions, and intimate still lives — under the influence of the Kōji-kai study circle around Imamura Shikō and Yasuda Yukihiko. The Tokyo National Museum, which acquired the painting as part of its modern Japanese painting holdings, preserves it as a key document of nihonga in the early Taishō period. For students of Hayami Gyoshū, Mount Hiei demonstrates how thoroughly the discipline of his later masterpieces — Dancing in the Flames, Camellia Petals Scattering, Emerald Mosses and Verdant Grass — was already in place by the time he was twenty-six.