River Landscape with Fireflies

Dated 1874 and held in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (accession 74-12/2), River Landscape with Fireflies is a pair of six-fold screens executed in ink with slight color and gold paint on paper that represents Shiokawa Bunrin's late mature command of the format and one of the supreme statements of the Shijō school's nocturnal landscape vocabulary. The screens, each approximately 170 by 380 centimeters when fully extended, depict a moonlit river landscape populated by fireflies (hotaru) whose tiny luminous trails are scattered across the broad expanse of the screen surfaces.

The firefly, a quintessential summer-evening subject in classical Japanese poetry and painting, allowed Bunrin to combine his characteristic atmospheric landscape mode with the kind of pictorial detail that Shijō painters had developed for naturalist subjects. The screens use ink as the dominant pigment, with selective gold paint applied to suggest the fireflies' luminescence and the moonlit reflections on the river surface. The economy of color and the dominance of tonal value over polychrome incident are characteristic of late-Edo and early-Meiji Kyoto landscape painting, where the literati emphasis on ink as the supreme medium and the Shijō commitment to atmospheric rather than descriptive depiction came together in works of subtle restraint.

Completed in the seventh year of the Meiji era, the Nelson-Atkins screens demonstrate the continuing vitality of the Shijō pictorial tradition and the continuing demand for it among elite patrons in early Meiji Kyoto. Bunrin's River Landscape with Fireflies stands as one of the finest examples of his work in any Western collection and one of the supreme nineteenth-century statements of the Shijō school's distinctive synthesis of atmospheric landscape and naturalist incident.