Coastal Landscape

Held in the Cleveland Museum of Art, this hanging scroll painted in ink on paper depicts a coastal landscape in the monochrome ink idiom of the Kano school, an aspect of Matabei's training that is less frequently seen in his surviving works than his more colorful genre and figure paintings. The work demonstrates Matabei's command of the rigorous brush vocabulary of suiboku-ga, the ink-painting tradition that the Kano school had inherited and adapted from Chinese Song and Yuan dynasty models, with its characteristic structure of foreground rocks, middle-ground water, and distant mountains receding into mist. The coastal subject, with its evocation of distant prospect and the transient passage of weather across water, is among the most established themes in the East Asian ink tradition, and Matabei's handling demonstrates both his fluency in the inherited brush conventions and the slightly more relaxed, naturalistic touch that characterized early Edo ink painting as it diverged from the more rigorous Muromachi precedents. The scroll provides essential evidence of the breadth of Matabei's training and the multiple pictorial idioms he could deploy, complicating the popular image of him as exclusively a genre painter and underlining the scholarly inheritance that he carried into the new pictorial culture of the seventeenth century.