New Leaves

New Leaves (新緑, Shinryoku), a hanging scroll in color on silk by Hayami Gyoshū, focuses on the foliage of late spring or early summer with the close observation that runs through all of the artist's nature work. The composition concentrates on overlapping young leaves rendered in graduated greens, with subtle modulations of mineral pigment carrying the sense of fresh growth and translucent veins. The work belongs to the kind of intimate, single-motif painting that recurs throughout Gyoshū's career alongside his more ambitious gold-ground screens and large-scale subjects — small, exact studies in which the disciplines of nihonga (close drawing, mineral pigment, silk ground) are applied to one slender motif observed at very close range. The image is preserved on Wikimedia Commons via the Google Art Project's documentation of works in Japanese public collections, providing high-resolution access to a painting that is otherwise relatively little known outside Japan. For students of Hayami Gyoshū, New Leaves is a useful counterweight to his most famous works: it shows the same draftsmanship and the same attention to mineral pigment that drive Dancing in the Flames and Camellia Petals Scattering, applied here to one of the gentlest possible seasonal subjects, and it underlines how thoroughly his practice was rooted in patient, sustained looking at the natural world.