Spring on a Mountain Path
山路之春
- Date:
- early 20th century
- Medium:
- Ink and color on silk; hanging scroll
山路之春
Spring on a Mountain Path (Sanro no Haru / 山路之春) is a hanging-scroll painting by Kawakita Kahō in the landscape (sansui) genre that occupied a central place in the Kyoto Maruyama-Shijō tradition as it descended from his teacher Kōno Bairei. The subject — a mountain path in spring — is one of the seasonal-landscape topoi most deeply associated with the Shijō tradition: the Maruyama-Shijō landscape vocabulary, codified by Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795) and his immediate followers and extended through the nineteenth century by Shiokawa Bunrin (1808-1877) and Kōno Bairei, had made the seasonal mountain path (especially in the spring with its budding willows and cherry, and in the autumn with its maples) a kind of test piece for the formally-trained Kyoto painter. The vertical hanging-scroll format gave Kahō the opportunity to deploy the long sweep of mountain path receding into atmospheric distance that had been one of the principal compositional innovations of the eighteenth-century Maruyama-Shijō school: the path climbs out of the foreground at the base of the composition, traverses the middle ground in a series of switchbacks, and dissolves into the misty distance at the upper register, while the seasonal foliage of the spring flowers and the budding trees fills the slopes on either side. The painting belongs to the corpus of landscape kakemono that Kahō produced throughout his mature career and that established him alongside Takeuchi Seihō, Kikuchi Hōbun, and Tsuji Kakō as one of the principal landscape painters of the second-generation Bairei circle. The image survives in private collections and is reproduced from the Kōbidō (古美堂) gallery archive of digitized Japanese paintings.
Spring on a Mountain Path (山路之春) was created by Kawakita Kahō (川北霞峰) in early 20th century.
Spring on a Mountain Path depicts spring.
