The Road to Abundance

The Road to Abundance (豊穣への道) is among the more substantial of the late landscape compositions associated with Honda Kinkichirō, and was exhibited at the 2021 yōga survey at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, where it appeared on loan from a private collection. The canvas presents an oblique view of a rural Japanese road climbing through fields and woodland toward a distant horizon, with a single figure walking the path and the title metaphorically connecting the agricultural promise of the season to the larger pictorial trope of the path of life found in late nineteenth-century European Symbolist landscape painting. The handling — the dark, earthy palette, the careful tonal modulation across the middle ground, the deliberate placement of the receding road as an organising perspectival device — is characteristic of the Foreign-Office and Barbizon-inflected manner in which Honda was trained, and the picture takes its place beside the Fuchū Landscape and the 1892 Tokyo National Museum studies as evidence of the kind of meditative, plein-air landscape painting that Honda continued to produce alongside his pedagogical work in the last decades of the Meiji period.