Takuhō Sōbetsu-zu (Farewell Picture for Takuhō), Sixth Scroll

Takuhō Sōbetsu-zu (卓峰送別図, 1890), here represented by the sixth scroll of the original mounted set, is one of Koyama Shōtarō's rare brush-and-ink works on paper, produced as a farewell offering to the Buddhist monk Takuhō Dōshū on the latter's departure from the Niigata region. The work belongs to a peculiar genre that survived from late Edo into early Meiji practice — the collaborative sōbetsu-zu, a long mounted picture-scroll in several panels, each by a different artist or scholar, presented as a parting gift — and Koyama's contribution shows him working in a soft watercolour manner that owes as much to his Army Topography Department training under Abel Guérineau as to his oil practice. The composition presents a quiet landscape of low hills with a winding water-course and a few small figures, the brushwork unhurried and modest, and the whole inflected by the literary and devotional character of the commission. As a document the painting is doubly important. It shows that even in 1890, after he had already founded the Fudōsha and was lecturing his oil students on rigorous Western drawing, Koyama remained willing to work in the brush-and-paper modes of the bunjin (literati) tradition, and it preserves an example of the regional, sometimes monastic, networks of patronage that Echigo Province continued to extend to its returning sons. The scroll was preserved through the twentieth century within the local Niigata cultural collections and is now documented and reproduced through the Niigata prefectural cultural-property surveys.