Sparklers on Summer Evening

Held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sparklers on Summer Evening is a hanging scroll painted in ink, color, and gold on silk that exemplifies Shiokawa Bunrin's mid-career mastery of the Shijō atmospheric mode. The work belongs to the tradition of summer-evening genre painting that Kyoto Shijō painters developed from the school's plein-air sketching practice, in which figures engaged in seasonal pastimes are situated within an atmospheric setting carried by tonal washes rather than by descriptive line. The subject of sparklers, the hand-held fireworks (senkō hanabi) that produced a brief shower of glittering sparks before extinguishing, was a quintessentially Japanese summer pleasure associated with Bon festival evenings and the cooling hours of summer dusk.

Bunrin's composition characteristically leaves substantial areas of the silk support unworked, allowing the ground itself to function as atmospheric depth, while the figures and the sparklers are rendered with delicate tonal modeling and careful pigment application. Touches of gold animate the sparkler trails and the highlights of the figures' summer kimono, contributing to the work's lyrical intimacy. The scroll demonstrates the way Maruyama-Shijō painters extended Maruyama Ōkyo's foundational naturalism into the more lyrical, atmospheric mode that Matsumura Goshun and his pupil Okamoto Toyohiko, Bunrin's teacher, had developed, an approach especially well suited to the suggestive depiction of nocturnal seasonal moments.

The scroll entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection through the bequest of Mary Griggs Burke (2015.300.208), one of the most important American collectors of Japanese art of the twentieth century, whose holdings in Kyoto painting of the Edo and early Meiji periods substantially shaped the museum's representation of the Shijō school. Bunrin's work in this format and subject area represents one of the most accomplished mid-nineteenth-century continuations of the Maruyama-Shijō pictorial tradition before its transmission into the early Meiji nihonga movement through pupils such as Kōno Bairei.