Yoroboshi

Yoroboshi, painted in 1915 and now held by the Tokyo National Museum as an Important Cultural Property, is the work most closely identified with Shimomura Kanzan's mature nihonga manner. The composition unfolds across a six-panel folding screen (byōbu) in colors and gold leaf on silk and depicts the title character of the Noh play Yoroboshi, the blind young mendicant priest Shuntokumaru. In Zeami's play, the disinherited son begs by the Tennōji temple in Osaka at the spring equinox and, in a celebrated moment, hallucinates the setting sun across the western sea as the Pure Land of Amida. Kanzan stages the figure beneath an enormous flowering cherry whose blossoms drift down across the gold ground in a continuous decorative register that reaches from one end of the screen to the other. The disposition draws openly on Yamato-e narrative painting and Rinpa-school gold-ground composition, while the figure of Yoroboshi is drawn with the disciplined Kanō line Kanzan had inherited from his teachers Kanō Hōgai and Hashimoto Gahō, modeled with the quiet European volumetric sense he had absorbed during his 1903-1905 government-grant study in England. The result is a synthesis that announces the program of the reorganized Nihon Bijutsuin, which Kanzan and Yokoyama Taikan had relaunched at Yanaka in 1914, the year before Yoroboshi was painted. The work is among the touchstone modern paintings of Taishō Japan and is regularly cited as a model for the integration of devotional Noh subject matter, classical Japanese decorative idiom, and modern compositional discipline that defined Kanzan's contribution to nihonga.