The Poet Li Bo's Visit to Mount Emei

Dated 1875 and held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Poet Li Bo's Visit to Mount Emei is a pair of six-panel folding screens executed in ink and gold on paper that represents Shiokawa Bunrin's late mature manner adapted to the most ambitious format of Japanese pictorial commission. The Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai (Li Bo, 701-762), celebrated alongside Du Fu as one of the two supreme poets of classical Chinese literature, was a recurring subject in Japanese Shijō and Nanga painting, where his legendary travels through the mountains of Sichuan and his reputation for inspired, wine-tinged composition made him an emblem of the literati ideal. Mount Emei (Emei-shan) in Sichuan, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains of China, was particularly associated with Li Bo through his poem celebrating the moonlight at Mount Emei.

Bunrin's composition arranges the figural subject across the gold-ground panels in the manner that Kyoto painters had developed for the most prestigious screen commissions, combining narrative human focus with extensive atmospheric landscape. The use of ink as the dominant pigment, with gold reserved for the ground and selective highlights, allows the screens to achieve the tonal subtlety that Shijō painters valued while maintaining the visual impact required of the byōbu format in a formal Japanese interior. As a work completed seven years into the Meiji era and only two years before Bunrin's death, the screens represent the survival of Kyoto Shijō pictorial values into the early Meiji period and the continuing relevance of Chinese literary subjects to a generation of Kyoto painters formed in the late Edo cultural milieu.

The screens entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 1998 (accession numbers 1998.189.1 and 1998.189.2) and remain among the finest documents of Bunrin's late career in any Western collection. They demonstrate his command of the most demanding pictorial format Japan had to offer and his ability to sustain the literary and atmospheric ambitions of the Shijō school into the new cultural environment of Meiji Kyoto.