Two Huts in Snow

Two Huts in Snow is a hanging-scroll painting by Matsumura Keibun in the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 28219), in ink and light color on paper, dated approximately to the painter's working life of 1779-1843. It depicts a winter landscape with two small huts set among snow-covered slopes and bare trees, a subject that draws on a centuries-old East Asian painting tradition reaching back through Yuan-dynasty winter landscape models and through their later Japanese adaptations in the Kanō and Nanga schools. Keibun was best known for bird-and-flower painting, but he also produced landscape and figure work across his career, and Two Huts in Snow is an important example of his rarer non-kachō-e mode. The handling — restrained washes of ink establishing the snow-laden hills and the bare branches, a careful gradation of value from foreground to distance, and a sparing use of color limited to the structural framing of the huts and the gray of the sky — reflects the Shijō school's synthesis of Maruyama school close observation (from Maruyama Ōkyo) and the softer, more atmospheric brushwork that his elder brother Matsumura Goshun had brought into the school from his earlier apprenticeship to Yosa Buson. The painting was given to the Art Institute by Mr. and Mrs. Harold G. Henderson alongside other examples of nineteenth-century Japanese painting and is among the more accessible Keibun works in a major American institutional collection.