Spring of a Main Road (Umayaji no Haru), left screen

Spring of a Main Road (駅路之春, Umayaji no Haru), the left screen of a pair of six-panel folding screens dated 1913, is one of the most celebrated works of Konoshima Ōkoku's Bunten years and now belongs to the Fukuda Art Museum in Kyoto. The left screen develops the landscape side of the composition: a flowering tree (cherry or willow, depending on the panel) spread across the upper register with mountainous distance dissolving into pale wash, the road of the title carrying the eye toward the figure subject on the companion screen. Ōkoku draws the landscape elements with the long diagonals and asymmetric placement characteristic of the Maruyama-Shijō tradition he had absorbed from his teacher Imao Keinen, while the soft tonalities of the spring foliage and the careful negative space anticipate the atmospheric restraint of his later painting. The work was exhibited at the seventh Bunten in 1913 and contributed to Ōkoku's reputation as the leading Kyoto narrative painter of his generation. Yamayuki and other commentators have repeatedly singled out the pair as a high point of Taishō folding-screen production, and the Fukuda Art Museum's acquisition of the screens in the 2010s gave them a renewed prominence among Kyoto nihonga of the period.