Pine, Rock, and Poem

Pine, Rock, and Poem is a tall hanging-scroll painting by Noguchi Shōhin in ink and color on silk, now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession 2013.29.981), where it represents the museum's principal holding of her work. The composition deploys a vertical bunjinga vocabulary that runs back to the Yuan-dynasty Chinese literati tradition and through the late-Edo Japanese nanga: the rocky outcrop occupies the foreground, a venerable pine grows from its surface and sweeps upward across the vertical axis of the composition, and Shōhin's own poetic inscription occupies the upper portion of the silk, completing the image as a single integrated work of painting, calligraphy, and poetry in the canonical literati mode. The combination of pine and rock had been one of the most loaded subjects of the East Asian painting tradition since the Song dynasty: the pine (matsu, 松) is the emblem of longevity, endurance, and Confucian moral steadiness, the rock (iwa, 巌) is the emblem of geological permanence and of the unmoved scholar, and their pairing announces a meditation on the virtues of the literati ideal that the bunjinga painter was expected to handle with restraint and erudition. Shōhin's treatment combines the layered ink wash and modulated tonal handling that she had absorbed under Hine Taizan with the careful close-observed drawing of the pine needles and the surface modeling of the rock that her broader training in the bunjin school had taught her, and the poetic inscription — composed and brushed by her own hand — completes the work in the integrated three-perfections mode that her literati patrons expected. The painting belongs to a substantial group of her late-career hanging-scroll compositions in which the integrated handling of painting and calligraphy is foregrounded; it is one of her best-known works in American collections and is widely cited as a representative example of her mature nanga style.