Autumnal Scenery

Autumnal Scenery is a hanging-scroll landscape painting by Murakami Kagaku in ink and color on paper, completed in 1919 and now held by the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi. The work was produced in the immediate aftermath of Kagaku's co-founding of the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai (National Painting Creation Society) with his Kyoto colleagues Tsuchida Bakusen, Ono Chikkyō, Sakakibara Shihō, and Nonagase Banka in 1918, and dates from the period when Kagaku was developing the personal landscape style that would dominate his retirement years at Suma. Autumnal Scenery shows the autumn mountains in misted depth, with foreground trees in the brilliant red of Japanese maples receding into pale washes of cloud and distant peaks; the composition is constructed with the spatial intelligence of the Chinese Song-dynasty landscape tradition but treated with the soft atmospheric handling characteristic of early twentieth-century Kyoto nihonga. The picture belongs to the small body of pre-Suma landscapes that Kagaku produced alongside his Buddhist figural work, and exemplifies the Maruyama-Shijō naturalism that he had absorbed in his student years under Takeuchi Seihō and his Kyoto teachers.