Ogurayama

Ogurayama, a pair of six-panel folding screens in color on silk, was painted by Kanzan in 1909 and is held by the Yokohama Museum of Art. The subject is Mt. Ogura (Ogurayama), the modest but storied hill at the western edge of Kyoto whose name is woven through the classical Japanese poetic tradition. It was on the slopes of Ogurayama that the early Kamakura poet-anthologist Fujiwara no Teika selected the hundred poems of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, the most widely memorized of all Japanese poetic anthologies, and the mountain accordingly carries a heavy charge of literary memory in the classical canon. Kanzan's screens treat the mountain in the wide horizontal format of the Yamato-e tradition and Rinpa landscape, with the slopes drawn in carefully graded ink and color and the mid-ground populated with the seasonal trees and grasses that the Hyakunin Isshu poems repeatedly invoke. The work belongs to the moment between his post-England Bunten triumphs and the 1914 revival of the Nihon Bijutsuin, and it shows the mature synthesis of disciplined Kanō line, Yamato-e and Rinpa decorative composition, and the spatial sensibility he had absorbed in London. The Yokohama Museum of Art acquired the screens as part of its collection of modern Japanese painting and they are regularly cited alongside Yoroboshi and Autumn among Trees in surveys of Kanzan's mature work.