Herd Boy

This hanging scroll in ink and color on silk, dated to circa 1900 and now in the Yale University Art Gallery, depicts a young herd boy on the back of a water buffalo or ox, the two figures progressing slowly through an open atmospheric landscape rendered in the mōrō-tai vocabulary that Hishida Shunsō and Yokoyama Taikan were developing during these years. The herd boy on his buffalo is one of the most resonant traditional subjects in East Asian painting and poetry, descended from the Chan Buddhist 'ox-herding' allegorical tradition of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (the famous Ten Ox-Herding Pictures), in which the search for the lost ox represents the search for the awakened mind. By Hishida's time the subject had passed from explicitly Buddhist allegory into a broader iconographic vocabulary of pastoral simplicity, evocative of the contemplative rural ideal celebrated in literati poetry. Hishida's treatment dissolves the conventional firm-line drawing of the figures into atmospheric tonal washes that integrate boy and buffalo into a unified landscape mood, with the surrounding fields and distant horizon handled in the silvery atmospheric color that distinguishes his mature work. The painting was acquired by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2002 (accession 2002.27.7) and represents one of the strongest examples in an American collection of Hishida's early mōrō-tai engagement with traditional East Asian pastoral subjects.