Spring Landscape

Spring Landscape is a set of two large hanging scrolls by Kawabata Gyokushō, executed in ink and color on silk during his late period (about 1900-1912) and acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1908 as the gift of Francis Lathrop (accession numbers 08.148.10 and .11). The pair functions as a single composition spread across two scrolls — a habit of presentation borrowed from the larger format of the folding screen and from the Buddhist pair-scroll tradition — depicting a Japanese mountain landscape in the soft, atmospheric mood of early spring. Each scroll measures roughly 123.5 by 50.2 cm (48 5/8 by 19 3/4 in.) in the image and 131.8 by 54.9 cm overall with mounting, a scale that places the work firmly within the public-facing, formal painting practice expected of a senior Meiji-period Imperial Household Artist. Gyokushō's Maruyama-Shijō training under Nakajima Raishō is evident in the careful drawing of trees, rocks, and water, while his selective absorption of Western perspective during his 1876-1878 study under Antonio Fontanesi at the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō shows in the calibrated recession of the distant peaks. As one of the few large-format Gyokushō landscape compositions in an American collection, the pair is a key example of his late-career engagement with the sansui-ga (landscape) genre and an important counterweight to the better-known small bird-and-flower album leaves he produced for the print trade.