Waterfall

Waterfall (瀑布図, Bakufu-zu) is a hanging-scroll painting by Konoshima Ōkoku in ink and color on silk, dated to the late 1910s and now held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 2021-03-088). The composition follows a long East Asian tradition of waterfall painting that descends from Song and Yuan landscape practice and reaches into the Japanese painting world through Sesshū, the Kanō school, and the Maruyama-Shijō painters in Ōkoku's own lineage. The waterfall itself is rendered as a near-vertical column of white silk, bracketed by rocks drawn in graduated ink wash and surrounded by foliage that suggests the surrounding ravine without becoming explicit. The handling shows the influence of the literati-painting tradition that Ōkoku had studied through his Chinese-classics education at the Heian Kangaku-kan, and the spare composition is characteristic of his mature work after the late 1910s, in which the elaborate narrative subjects of his Bunten years gave way to quieter atmospheric studies. The Honolulu Museum of Art's acquisition of the work and its public availability through Wikimedia Commons have made it one of the more widely circulated images of Ōkoku's painting outside Japan.