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.