Akitomo Kurio Trying to Save His Horse and Servant from Drowning

Akitomo Kurio Trying to Save His Horse and Servant from Drowning is a vertically-elongated hanging-scroll painting by Kawakita Kahō, executed in ink and color on silk and measuring 102 by 33 centimeters in image dimensions. The subject is drawn from one of the heroic episodes of medieval Japanese military narrative — the daring rescue, in the midst of a flooded river or a turbulent crossing, by a samurai of his servant and his horse from drowning waters — and is rendered in the figural narrative mode that Kahō had absorbed during his training under Kikuchi Hōbun (1862-1918) and that became one of the principal Kyoto specialties of the Bunten and Teiten exhibition world. The tall narrow format of the composition — a kakemono in roughly a one-to-three proportion — concentrates the dramatic action in a steep vertical axis, with the rider and his rearing horse occupying the upper register, the flailing figure of the servant in the middle, and the dark turbulent waters of the river at the base of the composition, a structural device that the later Shijō landscape painters had absorbed from the long tradition of vertical Japanese landscape painting (kakemono sansui). The painting reflects the same combination of Kyoto Maruyama-Shijō observation of horse anatomy and figural posture with the dramatic narrative subject vocabulary of historical military legend (gunki-mono) that characterized Kahō's exhibition pieces of the Taishō and early Shōwa periods. The work survives in private collections internationally and is representative of the figural narrative hanging scrolls for which Kahō was particularly admired in his mature period.