Kamigamo Shrine in Summer

Kamigamo Shrine in Summer is a six-panel folding screen (byōbu) by Mori Kansai in ink, color, and gold wash on paper, held by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (accession 35.147) and acquired by the museum in 1989 with funds from the W. Alton Jones Foundation. The screen depicts the Kamigamo Shrine — one of the two oldest Shintō shrines in Kyoto, founded in the seventh century and dedicated to the deity Kamo-wake-ikazuchi — in its summer landscape: cypress and pine trees in deep summer green, the iconic torii gate and shrine buildings rising above the trees, and the famous Kamo River curving through the foreground. The painting is paired in the Walters with a companion screen of Byōdō-in Temple in Winter, the two screens together forming a meditation on the great religious sites of the ancient Kyoto and Uji landscape across opposing seasons. Datable to between 1860 and 1870, the screens belong to Kansai's mature pre-Meiji and early Meiji production and exemplify the Mori-Kishi school's command of large-scale landscape composition, combining the close-observed pine and cypress drawing of the school's natural-history practice with the broad horizontal sweep that the byōbu format demanded.