Dead Tree and Rocks

Dead Tree and Rocks (Koboku ganseki-zu) is a small ink-on-paper composition from the late 1870s in which Kawakami Tōgai returns to the pure nanga (literati) vocabulary he had absorbed as a young man from Ōnishi Chinnen and, behind Chinnen, from the great early-Edo Bunjin painter Tani Bunchō. The composition — a leaning, half-broken pine or oak above an outcrop of layered rock — is one of the canonical motifs of Chinese and Japanese literati landscape, with a lineage that runs from Ni Zan and the Yuan masters through the Edo Bunjin school to the painters of Tōgai's own generation.

The surviving photographic record (319 by 223 pixels via the ArtNet database and Wikimedia Commons) preserves a small horizontal composition in which the brushwork is exceptionally restrained: a few dry strokes for the broken trunk, an open contour for the rocks, almost no wash, and considerable empty ground. The painting is significant precisely because it is so far removed from Tōgai's daytime occupation as the principal Western-style teacher of his generation: it is the work of a painter who, despite a career devoted to perspective and academic modelling, remained at heart a Shinano literatus formed in the Shijō-Bunjin tradition. Several later historians, including Hayashi Tadamasa, regarded the ink work of Tōgai's last decade as the most original part of his output, more accomplished than the watercolour and oil studies that consumed most of his energy.