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.

The composition relies on the Shijō convention of leaving extensive areas of the silk support unworked to function as atmospheric depth, with mountains, water, and vegetation rendered through tonally graded ink washes built up from light to dark. The moon itself emerges from the composition as a circular field of reserve, surrounded by the carefully gradated tonal field that suggests both the moon's luminosity and the surrounding atmosphere. This pictorial economy was central to the Shijō manner and distinguished it from the more linear, descriptively detailed approach favored by Kanō and Tosa academy painters.

The scroll entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 1936 alongside the companion Bird on a Branch, and although given as 'Attributed to Shiokawa Bunrin,' the work documents Bunrin's characteristic moonlit landscape mode and the broader Shijō atmospheric vocabulary as it was practiced in mid-nineteenth-century Kyoto. As a representative example of the school's nocturnal landscape tradition, the scroll situates Bunrin within the lineage of Kyoto painters whose work would eventually feed into the early Meiji nihonga synthesis pursued by his student Kōno Bairei and the next generation of Kyoto painters.