Landscape

Held in the Fuchū Art Museum in Tokyo, Honda Kinkichirō's Landscape (風景, 1898) is a mature easel oil from the painter's later Meiji period, when he had been running the Shōgidō for two decades and was teaching drawing at both the Army Officer School and the Naval Academy. The horizontal canvas (approximately 65 by 88 cm) shows a quiet stretch of mixed pine and deciduous woodland on the outskirts of a Tokyo suburb, organised around a central earth path receding toward the middle distance and animated by the broken light of a clouded afternoon. The composition is unmistakably indebted to the tradition of the French and Italian Barbizon landscape that Antonio Fontanesi had introduced to Japan in the late 1870s, and which the first generation of Meiji yōga painters — Asai Chū, Yamamoto Hōsui and Honda himself — had taken as their foundational model. The lower-keyed palette and the dark, almost umber, foreground earth distinguish Honda's manner from the brighter plein-air style that Kuroda Seiki's Hakubakai was promoting at the same date, and the painting stands as one of the few large landscape canvases by which the painter can be judged today.