Spring Mountain (Haruyama)

Spring Mountain (Haruyama, 春山) is a 1933 hanging-scroll painting by Hirafuku Hyakusui in ink and color on silk, widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of his late career and completed in the year of his death at the age of 56. The painting is held by the Akita Museum of Modern Art in Yokote, near the town of Kakunodate where Hyakusui was born — one of several major Hyakusui paintings concentrated in Akita Prefecture museums as part of the regional commemoration of its native son. The composition presents the silhouette of a Tōhoku mountain in early spring, when the snow is beginning to clear from the upper slopes and the lower hills are tinged with the first greens and the pale rose of mountain cherries. Hyakusui's drawing combines the close shasei (sketching from life) discipline he had absorbed through his father Hirafuku Suian and his Tokyo School of Fine Arts teacher Kawabata Gyokushō with the wider compositional clarity that defined the Mugonkai reform of nihonga he had co-founded in 1901. The paint surface is restrained: ink defining the structure of the mountain and the trees, with washes of color subordinated to atmospheric effect rather than asserted as decorative pattern. The Spring Mountain stands as a final statement of Hyakusui's lifelong commitment to the landscape of northern Japan and to a quiet, observed nihonga style that resisted both the historicizing nationalism of the Nihon Bijutsuin and the brilliant decorative manner of his contemporaries.