Kanga shinan, nihen 漢画指南二編

Kanga shinan, nihen (漢画指南二編, Guide to Chinese-Style Painting, Second Series), held by the British Museum, is the continuation of Kawamura Bunpō's printed instruction manual for the kanga (Chinese-style) painting tradition. Where his Bunpō gafu series codified the Maruyama-Shijō manner in which he was trained, the Kanga shinan volumes addressed the parallel tradition of Chinese-derived painting that occupied much of late-Edo Kyoto's artistic culture, including Nanga literati landscape and the older Kano school registers. The nihen (second series) extends and deepens the program of the original Kanga shinan, presenting brushed figures, landscapes, plants, and animals in compositions adapted from Chinese pictorial sources and rendered in woodblock with the calibrated line and restrained tone characteristic of kanga practice. Each opening serves as a teaching example: a single subject drawn at sufficient scale to model brushwork, isolated against a near-empty ground so that the structure of the brushed line is legible. The British Museum holds this volume within its Japanese illustrated book collections, where it sits alongside Bunpō's other manuals as evidence of his sustained pedagogical project. For Kawamura Bunpō specifically, the Kanga shinan series demonstrates the range of his late-Edo Kyoto practice — Maruyama-Shijō observation on one hand, kanga brush instruction on the other — and his unusual willingness to use the e-hon medium to teach across both traditions.