Landscape with the Moon

Attributed to Shiokawa Bunrin and held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (36.100.5), Landscape with the Moon is a nineteenth-century hanging scroll painted in ink and color on silk that exemplifies one of Bunrin's signature subjects: the moonlit landscape executed in the suggestive, atmospheric mode that the Maruyama-Shijō tradition had developed for nocturnal and crepuscular scenes. The full or rising moon, set within a mist-veiled landscape and rendered as a circle of unworked silk or reserved white pigment, was a recurring subject in Bunrin's oeuvre, allowing him to combine the Shijō school's atmospheric tonal technique with the literary associations of moon-viewing (tsukimi) that ran throughout classical Japanese poetic and pictorial tradition.