Shower (Yūdachi), right screen

Shower (驟雨, Yūdachi), the right screen of the pair of six-panel folding screens dated 1907, carries the figure subject: a small group of horsemen and travelers caught in a sudden downpour, hats and robes pulled up against the rain, the horses' heads turned by the gust. Konoshima Ōkoku draws the figures and horses with the close anatomical observation he had absorbed from his teacher Imao Keinen, capturing the particular postures of bodies bracing against weather. The composition handles the figure side of a paired structure in which left and right screens function together: the storm comes in from the left over the landscape, and the figures react on the right. Exhibited at the first Bunten in 1907, the pair won critical attention as one of the strongest weather-narrative paintings of its generation, and it set a template for Ōkoku's later compositions on travelers, journeys, and atmospheric drama — a thread that runs through the 1913 Spring of a Main Road and the 1922 Hardness of Travelers' Ways and connects to the Tang and Song poetic-subject paintings that preoccupied him throughout his career.