Lamenting over the Tomb of a Sage (right screen)

Lamenting over the Tomb of a Sage (Nageki no haka, 嘆きの墓) is a pair of folding screens in ink and color on paper completed by Kikuchi Keigetsu in 1908 and now held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Tokyo Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan). The work is among the most ambitious of Keigetsu's early ventures into large-format historical narrative and was shown at the second Bunten (Ministry of Education Art Exhibition) in 1908, where it established him as a major younger figure in Kyoto nihonga. The composition treats a Chinese literary subject — a group of mourners gathered at the grave of a Daoist or Confucian sage — and unfolds across the two screens in the figural-narrative manner Keigetsu had absorbed from his adoptive father Kikuchi Hōbun. The drawing combines the precise figural observation of the Maruyama-Shijō tradition with the dramatic atmospheric handling that Kyoto painters of Keigetsu's generation were learning from late-nineteenth-century European prints. The work is reproduced as a benchmark of early-Meiji-into-Taishō Kyoto historical painting and survives as one of the foundational documents of Keigetsu's career.