Landscape

Landscape, dated 1868, is held by the Art Institute of Chicago and belongs to a group of small natural-subject works produced by Shibata Zeshin at the moment of transition from the Edo to the Meiji period. The year 1868 marked the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and the formal beginning of the Meiji era, and Zeshin, then in his sixty-first year, was working through that transitional moment in a series of intimate compositions that drew on the landscape tradition he had absorbed from his Shijo training. Suzuki Nanrei and Okamoto Toyohiko, his Kyoto teachers, had given him the Shijo manner for handling landscape with the school's typical economy, in which the major features of mountain, water, and sky were registered through carefully calibrated brushwork rather than through accumulated detail. The composition accordingly distills the landscape subject to its essential pictorial components, leaving large areas of paper unmarked as both atmosphere and compositional breath. Zeshin's earliest training under Koma Kansai II in lacquer had taught him the discipline of irrevocable gesture on a polished ground, and his painted landscapes of this period carry the lacquer-painter's instinct for calibrated economy into the brushed medium. The intimate format of the work suits the meditative subject, and the composition reads as a study in tonal and gestural restraint. As Zeshin entered the Meiji period he would extend his landscape practice into new institutional formats, including paintings for the early Meiji domestic and international expositions, but works of 1868 like this one capture him in the more private mode of his Edo-trained album and small-format practice. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the work (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/49329) as a representative document of that transitional moment.