Moonlit Evening
月夜
- Date:
- 1913
- Medium:
- Hanging scroll; ink and light color on silk
月夜
Moonlit Evening (Tsukiyo) is a 1913 hanging-scroll painting by Kawai Gyokudō in ink and light color on silk, now held by the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture, one of the foremost collections of nihonga in Japan. The work measures approximately 1.83 by 1 meter and shows a moonlit landscape with low foreground hills, water in the middle distance, and the disc of the full moon set in a thinly washed evening sky. Gyokudō works almost entirely in subdued tonal range, with [sumi](/glossary/sumi) ink building the structure of trees and hills and only the faintest passages of color suggesting atmosphere, in keeping with the classical Japanese tradition of moon-and-landscape imagery that he had absorbed from his Shijō and Kanō teachers. The composition demonstrates the calm, humane register that distinguished Gyokudō's mature work from the more dramatic atmospheric experiments of contemporaries such as Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunsō: he favored a quieter, more domestic landscape, observed rather than allegorical, rooted in specific Japanese topography. Painted in the middle of his Tokyo years and only a few years before the major Parting Spring screens of 1916, Moonlit Evening is an important example of how Gyokudō translated the Shijō tradition of bird-and-flower painting into a fully developed mature landscape practice.
![Mount Fuji on a Moonlit Night, Kawai Bridge (Tsukiyo no Fuji [Kawaibashi]), from the series "Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu)" by Kawase Hasui](https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/d0960668-1e73-339a-b182-fb995a54bff0/full/843,/0/default.jpg)
1947
Color woodblock print; oban
March 1933
Color woodblock print; oban
1919
Color woodblock print
January 1938
Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
Moonlit Evening (月夜) was created by Kawai Gyokudō (川合玉堂) in 1913.
Moonlit Evening depicts moonlight.
