Spring Warmth (Haru atatakai no zu)

Spring Warmth (Haru atatakai no zu, also catalogued under the French title Chaleur de printemps) is a hanging-scroll painting by Kawabata Gyokushō, signed and dated March 1881, held by the Musée Cernuschi in Paris (accession M.C. 2011-22). The work was produced at the threshold of Gyokushō's mature Tokyo career, between his return from Western-style study under Antonio Fontanesi at the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō and his appointment to the founding faculty of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1889; it is one of relatively few dated and documented Gyokushō scrolls of the early 1880s in a European collection. The composition takes up the standard Japanese painting subject of early-spring warmth, with the seasonal vocabulary of plum blossom, willow shoots, and a soft, atmospheric handling of light that brings the visual mood of haru atatakai ("spring is warm") into pictorial form. Gyokushō's Maruyama-Shijō discipline of close observation of plants and atmosphere, learned in Kyoto under Nakajima Raishō, is here filtered through the lightly Western-influenced sense of atmospheric perspective that he had taken from Fontanesi's teaching. The painting's later acquisition by the Musée Cernuschi — France's principal museum of Asian art, founded on the collection of Henri Cernuschi (1821-1896) — gave it a place in the major European public collection of nineteenth-century Japanese painting.