Byōdō-in Temple in Winter

Byōdō-in Temple in Winter is the winter companion to the Walters Art Museum's Mori Kansai pair of six-panel screens (accession 35.148), executed in ink, gold wash, and discrete color on paper between 1860 and 1870. The screen depicts the Phoenix Hall (Hōō-dō) of the Byōdō-in temple at Uji, just south of Kyoto — the eleventh-century Fujiwara family hall, dedicated to Amida Buddha, that is one of the most iconic surviving buildings of Heian-period Japan and the model for one face of the modern ten-yen coin. Kansai shows one wing and the central pavilion of the hall rising above bare winter trees in the temple's pond garden, with snow on the rooftops and the long horizontal sweep of the byōbu format giving the architecture an almost atmospheric distance. The combination of summer Kamigamo and winter Byōdō-in pairs the two great religious centers of the Kyoto and Uji region and creates a paired landscape statement about the long, sacralized cultural geography of the old capital. The screens, acquired by the Walters in 1989, are among the most important Kansai screens in an American museum collection and represent the painter at the height of his pre-Meiji landscape practice.