Spring Rain

Spring Rain, painted in 1916 and held by the Tokyo National Museum, is one of Shimomura Kanzan's most lyrical Taishō-period folding-screen compositions and a close companion to the celebrated Yoroboshi of the previous year. The work is laid out across a pair of folding screens and treats the quiet phenomenon of haru no ame, the soft spring rain that drifts through the gardens and woodland edges of central Japan during the cherry-blossom season. Kanzan handles the subject with the quiet decorative register of the Yamato-e and Rinpa traditions, the rain itself indicated through a network of fine vertical strokes that read at distance as an atmospheric veil, the foreground populated with the seasonal flora of spring. The composition continues the lifelong project of synthesis that defines his mature manner: the disciplined Kanō line of his teachers Hōgai and Gahō, redirected through the Yamato-e and Rinpa traditions that the Nihon Bijutsuin had encouraged the post-Okakura generation to study, and inflected with the quiet European spatial sensibility he had absorbed during his 1903-1905 study in England. The picture entered the Tokyo National Museum's collection as part of its program of acquiring exemplary modern nihonga from the Bijutsuin circle and is regularly displayed alongside Yoroboshi to document the mature Taishō manner of one of the central painters of the reorganized academy.