Kōryū Hyakuri-zu (Landscape Scenes Along the River)

Kōryū Hyakuri-zu (Landscape Scenes Along the River, 江流百里図) is a long handscroll painting by Kanō Hōgai in ink and colour on paper, dated to about 1885 and held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession 11.4805). The title — literally "a hundred ri of river current" — situates the work within a long East Asian tradition of panoramic river-landscape handscrolls, of which the most famous predecessor is the Northern Song handscroll Along the River During Qingming. Hōgai's scroll unfolds horizontally through a continuous landscape of cliffs, riverside villages, fishing boats, bridges, and travellers, all rendered in the precise Kanō brushwork he had absorbed from his master Kanō Shōsen'in Tadanobu and adapted to the atmospheric, perspectival handling he developed under Ernest Fenollosa in the 1880s. The painting was acquired in 1911 from the Fenollosa-Weld circle and entered the MFA Boston's collection of Meiji painting, which remains the largest such holding outside Japan. It is one of Hōgai's most ambitious treatments of the river-landscape subject and a key document of how the artist adapted classical Chinese-derived landscape conventions for the founding generation of nihonga.