Waterfall in Spring and Autumn

Waterfall in Spring and Autumn is a pair of hanging scrolls by Kishi Chikudō painted in 1893 and now in the collection of the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture, executed in color on silk. The work depicts two waterfalls in contrasting seasonal moments — one set against the budding foliage of spring and the other against the red and gold maples of autumn — and demonstrates the convention of the seasonal pair (ki tsui) that runs through East Asian painting from the Song-dynasty academy onward and that the Kyoto painting world had codified into one of the standard formats for the senior nihonga painter. The waterfall (taki) carries strong associations in the Japanese tradition with mountain austerities, Buddhist purification, and the visual rhetoric of moving water that the Maruyama-Shijō painters had refined; Chikudō's handling of the cascade combines the careful descriptive observation of water movement that his earliest training under Nakajima Raishō had instilled with the dramatic compositional sweep inherited from his Kishi-school teachers Renzan and Ganku. The pair was painted in the last years of Chikudō's career, when he was at the height of his reputation as the leading Kyoto painter of his generation, and the Adachi Museum's holding of the work places it in one of the central institutional collections of modern Japanese painting.