The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion (front); Geese among Reeds (back)

The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion (front); Geese among Reeds (back) is a monumental pair of six-panel folding screens by Noguchi Shōhin, executed in 1900 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the work represents one of the museum's most important Meiji-period nanga holdings. The front of each screen carries the gathering at the Orchid Pavilion, the foundational scene of the Chinese literati tradition: the early-fourth-century gathering at the Lanting Pavilion in Kuaiji organized by the calligrapher Wang Xizhi, at which forty-two scholar-officials drank wine, composed poems, and produced the Lantingji Xu (Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Anthology), the most celebrated single piece of writing in the history of Chinese calligraphy and one of the canonical reference points of all subsequent East Asian literati culture. The subject was a standard test for the senior literati painter — a chance to deploy the full vocabulary of bunjinga in a composition that announced one's place in the Wang Xizhi lineage — and Shōhin's treatment, executed in ink, color, and gold on silk, combines the layered atmospheric distance of the Yuan-dynasty literati landscape masters with the close figural drawing of the scholarly gathering itself, the small figures of the participants arrayed along the winding stream of the pavilion garden in the asymmetric compositional habit that the Chinese tradition had codified. The reverse of the screens depicts geese among reeds (rogan, 蘆雁), a separate but equally canonical subject in the East Asian repertoire, here executed in the more austere palette of ink and silver on paper that the bunjin tradition reserved for the more meditative reverse compositions. The screen pair was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago and was prominently exhibited at the memorial exhibition organized by the artist's daughter Noguchi Shōkei in 1929, twelve years after her mother's death. As a single work the screens demonstrate the full range of Shōhin's mature style — the literati erudition required to handle the Orchid Pavilion subject, the technical command required to bring six panels of figural and landscape composition to balance, and the disciplined restraint of the geese-and-reeds reverse — and stand as one of her most ambitious surviving compositions. The work is in the public domain and is available through the Art Institute of Chicago's IIIF image server.