Fisherman

Fisherman (漁夫) is a color woodblock print after Komuro Suiun's landscape composition, depicting the canonical literati figure subject of the solitary fisherman by a river or lake. The fisherman (gyofu in Japanese, yufu in Chinese) is one of the most heavily encoded figure subjects in the East Asian literati tradition: the figure derives from the Chinese Daoist text of the Zhuangzi and from the medieval Chinese poetry of Liu Zongyuan and the Yuan-dynasty hermit poets, where he serves as an embodiment of the unworldly recluse who has withdrawn from official service to live in voluntary obscurity by the waters of the countryside. The subject was carried into the Japanese nanga tradition by Ike no Taiga and Yosa Buson in the late Edo period, and Suiun's handling continues the long lineage of the fisherman as a vehicle for literati contemplation of the natural world rather than as an actual genre study of the working life. The composition typically shows the small figure of the fisherman in a boat or seated on a rock by the water's edge, with the surrounding landscape — willows, distant mountains, an expanse of water — built up in the bone-line brushwork and controlled wash that distinguished Suiun's mature manner. The print belongs to the small-format landscape and figure subjects that the Tokyo publishers issued from Suiun's drawings in the inter-war decades.