Dusk in Wintertime

Dusk in Wintertime (雪暮, Setsubon) is a painting by Konoshima Ōkoku dated to about 1930, executed in ink and color on silk in the formal folding-screen format that he had used throughout his Bunten and Teiten career. The composition pairs two of the most evocative subjects of Japanese seasonal painting: the winter snow landscape and the quiet light of dusk, themes with deep roots in classical Japanese and Chinese painting and poetry. Ōkoku draws the landscape elements with the close observation of bare branches, snow-laden trees, and atmospheric ink wash that characterizes his late career, by which point he had largely withdrawn from the official salon system and devoted himself to the quieter, more introspective painting that occupies his last decade. The work exemplifies the late style in which the elaborate narrative subjects of his earlier Bunten paintings give way to atmospheric studies in which ink wash and restraint do most of the descriptive work — a manner increasingly out of step with the louder currents of Shōwa nihonga but valued by later twentieth-century audiences for the authority of its drawing and the precision of its observation.