Bunpō sansui gafu 文鳳山水画譜 (Bunpō's Landscape Painting Manual)

Bunpō sansui gafu (文鳳山水画譜, Bunpō's Landscape Painting Manual), held by the British Museum and dated 1824, is Kawamura Bunpō's dedicated landscape companion to his earlier Bunpō gafu series and one of the most fully realized printed landscape manuals of late-Edo Kyoto. The title's sansui (山水, mountains-and-water) signals its place in the long East Asian tradition of brush-trained landscape painting, but the volume's organization is recognizably Maruyama-Shijō: each opening isolates a single landscape motif — distant peaks half-veiled in mist, a brushed wash standing in for a riverbank, a foreground cluster of pines and rocks — and renders it in graded color woodblock that mimics brush-on-paper effects rather than the flatter palettes of contemporary Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) landscape design. Bunpō trained in the Shijō lineage descending from Maruyama Ōkyo and Matsumura Goshun, and Bunpō sansui gafu uses the printed page to teach the school's preferred approach to landscape: spatial recession built through gradations of ink wash, calibrated brush outline for trees and rocks, and a restraint of detail that leaves room for the viewer's eye. Issued posthumously after Bunpō's death in 1821, the volume extends the program of his earlier painting manuals into a discrete landscape teaching tool. The British Museum holds this work within its Japanese illustrated book collections, where it sits alongside the Bunpō gafu series as evidence of Kawamura Bunpō's sustained project of codifying Maruyama-Shijō practice for a printed-book audience.