Stormy Coast

Stormy Coast (怒涛, dotō) is a 1926 painting by Hirafuku Hyakusui in ink and color on silk, depicting the rough waters of a stormy coast in dynamic wave forms reminiscent of the wave studies that recur through the history of Japanese painting from Sesshū through Korin's rough-water screens to Hokusai's Great Wave. Hyakusui's treatment is markedly different from any of these prototypes: where Hokusai had built his great wave from line and pattern, Hyakusui builds his sea from washes of ink, modulated graduations of color, and a steady refusal of the decorative impulse. The painting belongs to Hyakusui's mature middle period in the mid-1920s, after he had been a founding member of the Kinreisha exhibition society (1916) with Yūki Somei and Kaburaki Kiyokata, and was approaching his appointment as a professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (1929) and his election to the Imperial Art Academy (1930). The mid-1920s were a period in which Hyakusui's landscape painting deepened from the regional Tōhoku scenes of his earlier career into a more universal grappling with weather, water, and the structures of the natural world. Stormy Coast is widely reproduced in Japanese reference works on Taishō and early Shōwa nihonga and is one of the most accessible images of Hyakusui's mid-career landscape practice.