Landscape

Landscape (Fukei), dated 1930, is a generic-titled Showa-period landscape by Maruyama Banka (1867-1942), preserved through an exhibition-catalogue reproduction on Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maruyama_Banka_-_Landschaft.jpg). The German title Landschaft under which the file is catalogued reflects the German-language exhibition cataloguing through which much of Banka's surviving inter-war oeuvre was documented. The 1930 date places the work within the mature Showa-period landscape production from which a substantial part of Banka's surviving body emerged, when he had returned definitively to Japan after his extended European residence and was producing landscape subjects that combined his Western training with the topographical specifics of the Japanese countryside. The generic title Fukei or Landscape, common to a substantial part of Banka's late output, signals the artist's mature focus on landscape as a self-sufficient pictorial mode and his orientation toward the formal and tonal concerns of European post-Impressionist practice rather than toward the famous-place specificity that distinguished much earlier Japanese topographical painting. The composition typically organises a middle-distance topographical element, a hill or copse or settlement, framed by foreground vegetation and supported by a quieter far ground; the palette, characteristic of his late landscape practice, holds within the muted greens, browns and atmospheric tones of the rural Japanese landscape. Within Banka's career, Landscape belongs to the mature run of seasonal- and topographical-subject paintings on which his Showa-period reputation rested, and the survival of multiple 1930-dated Landscape, Blooming Trees, Landscape with Ruins and Hakuba designs through German-language exhibition cataloguing documents the inter-war international diffusion of his Showa output.