Fallen Leaves (Ochiba)

Painted in 1909 and exhibited at the third Bunten exhibition that autumn, Fallen Leaves (Ochiba) is generally considered Hishida Shunsō's single greatest achievement and has been designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan. The work is a pair of six-panel folding screens (rokkyokubyōbu) depicting a stand of mature oak trees in a deep forest, their autumn leaves drifting and accumulating across the ground in a slow, silent descent. The composition extends laterally across the full twelve panels of the two screens, with the major tree trunks placed asymmetrically as vertical accents and the smaller saplings, leaf litter, and patches of moss filling the intervening space with a quiet, distributed visual rhythm. Hishida has worked the screens in a relatively limited palette of muted brown, ochre, and grey-green tones on a buff paper ground, with the autumn leaves picked out in slightly higher-keyed orange and yellow accents that punctuate the composition like flecks of light. The mōrō-tai technique reaches a particular refinement here: the trees and the forest floor are built up from layered washes of color and tone with almost no defining contour lines, producing an atmosphere of cool, still autumn air that envelops the entire scene. The work draws on the long East Asian tradition of grove and forest screen painting that runs from the early-modern Rinpa masters through the Maruyama-Shijō school, but the muted palette and atmospheric approach are distinctively modern. The screens are now held in the Eisei Bunko Museum, Tokyo.