Landscape

Landscape is one of the album leaves from the Met's substantial group of Kawabata Gyokushō works given to the museum in 1914 as part of the Charles Stewart Smith Collection (accession 14.76.61.67). It is an album-format painting (36.8 by 29.2 cm, 14 1/2 by 11 1/2 in.) in ink and color on silk, dated about 1887-1892 — the period in which Gyokushō was at the height of his powers as a Tokyo painter and had recently joined the founding faculty of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The album leaf is a characteristic small Meiji-period nihonga composition: a quiet landscape view, rendered in the Maruyama-school manner that descends from Maruyama Ōkyo through Gyokushō's teacher Nakajima Raishō, with the trees, rocks, and water observed and drawn with the patience and economy that the Kyoto naturalist tradition demanded. The Charles Stewart Smith group of Gyokushō paintings, comprising more than a dozen album leaves of birds, flowers, animals, and landscapes given to the museum in his memory by his family, is one of the most coherent collections of Gyokushō's small-format work in the West and an essential reference for understanding his daily painting practice in the early Meiji decades.