Fruit and a Taihu Rock

Fruit and a Taihu Rock is a leaf from the 1873 album by Mori Kansai in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (accession 2001.16D). The composition combines a still-life arrangement of fruit with a taihuseki — the pitted limestone rock from Lake Tai near Suzhou that became one of the most prized literati garden stones in China and Japan, valued for its grotesque holed-and-pierced form. Such still-life-with-rock subjects belonged to the Chinese-style (kanga) painting repertoire that Kyoto painters of the Edo and early Meiji periods absorbed through study of Chinese painting models and through the Nanga (literati) tradition. Kansai's drawing of the rock — careful attention to the pierced cavities, the textured surface, the asymmetric vertical mass — and his handling of the fruit demonstrate his command of the literati-style subject in addition to his school's specialty in animal and bird-and-flower painting. Signed and dated 1873.