Landscape in February

Landscape in February (Nigatsu no koro, 二月乃頃) is a hanging-scroll painting by Murakami Kagaku in color on silk, completed in 1911 as his graduation work at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting and exhibited at the Fifth Bunten national salon, where it received an honorable mention. The picture depicts a snow-bound landscape in late winter, with the muted color and atmospheric softness that the Kyoto Maruyama-Shijō tradition had developed for snow subjects since the eighteenth century. The work belongs to the very earliest period of Kagaku's career — he was twenty-three at the time — and shows him absorbing the methods of his teachers Takeuchi Seihō and Yamamoto Shunkyo with full technical mastery, but already pressing them toward a more reflective, philosophically inflected vision of landscape than his teachers themselves attempted. The painting's recognition at the Bunten established Kagaku as a rising figure in the Kyoto nihonga world and set the trajectory that would lead, seven years later, to his co-founding of the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai with Tsuchida Bakusen, Ono Chikkyō, and his other classmates.