Duxiu Peak, after a Chinese painting

Duxiu Peak, after a Chinese Painting is a hanging scroll (120.65 x 42.55 cm) in ink and color on paper, dated 1827 and held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession 2015.114.23). Duxiu Peak (独秀峰, "single peak rising alone") is one of the most celebrated of the karst limestone pinnacles at Guilin in southern China — a landscape that had been a subject of Chinese poetry and painting for centuries and stood in the literati imagination as one of the canonical "famous places" of the Chinese world. San'yō, who never traveled to China, painted it 1827 after an unspecified Chinese model, treating the act of copying or paraphrasing a Chinese composition as a legitimate scholarly exercise — the literati ideal of working through the masters of the past in one's own brush. The use of color on paper rather than pure ink monochrome marks the work as one of his more finished, formal landscapes, and the 1827 date places it in the same productive period as Cherry Blossoms at Yoshino and the publication of the Nihon Gaishi. It was acquired by MIA in 2015 as one of the later additions to the museum's San'yō holdings.