Bamboo Grove

Bamboo Grove (竹林図) is a pair of six-panel folding screens (byōbu) by Imao Keinen, executed in ink and gold leaf on paper and dated to about 1920, in the painter's last decade. The work is held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 2002.366.1-2). Across the twelve combined panels, Keinen renders a grove of bamboo with varied tones of ink — dark stalks in the foreground, paler stalks in the middle distance, lighter washes drifting away into the gold-leaf ground so that the bamboo appears to disappear into a golden mist. The composition draws on a centuries-old East Asian tradition of bamboo painting and on the gold-ground decorative practice that Maruyama Ōkyo and the Shijō school had absorbed from Rinpa and Kanō models; at the same time, the screens reflect the specific late-Meiji and Taishō taste for nihonga painters working at large scale with gold backgrounds. Keinen's command of ink gradation, which had served him well across decades of kachō-e production, is here deployed at architectural scale, producing one of his most ambitious surviving works in the formal screen format. The pair was acquired by the museum in 2002 and is among the most significant Meiji-Taishō Japanese paintings in an American institutional collection.