Winter Mountain

Winter Mountain (Fuyu-yama), a Taishō-period landscape of about 1920 in color on paper, held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 13222.1), is an elongated vertical composition in which Kondō Kōichirō depicts a snow-covered mountain rising through layers of mist. The vertical hanging-scroll format with its tall, narrow proportions is the classical East Asian carrier for mountain imagery, descending from Northern Song landscape painting and through centuries of Japanese sansui practice, and Kondō uses it here to deploy the full vocabulary of his mature ink landscape: the foreground mountainside rendered in firm dark strokes and broken washes that suggest snow on bare branches and rock; the middle distance dissolving into atmospheric haze; and the upper register opening into a soft, light-filled sky from which the peak emerges only partially. Although the picture is described as in color on paper, the palette is restrained and dominated by ink tonality with discreet accents — characteristic of Kondō's preference for muraqi (ink-tone) values even in non-monochrome work. Painted around the time he began exhibiting Japanese-style landscapes at the Japan Art Institute (Inten, from 1919), the painting represents the early flowering of the suiboku sansui-ga style for which he would become best known, and which placed him within a small group of Taishō nihonga painters working at the boundary between classical East Asian landscape and modern atmospheric naturalism.