Fireflies Over the Uji River by Moonlight

A Meiji-period hanging scroll held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicting one of the most famous nighttime scenes in Japanese poetry: the firefly-haunted reaches of the Uji river south of Kyoto, where summer fireflies were said to be the spirits of fallen warriors of the medieval Heike and Genji armies. Shōnen executes the subject in ink, color, and gold on silk, using the gold to suggest the diffused light of the moon on water and the bright pinpoint trails of the fireflies themselves. The composition is built up in atmospheric layers — riverbank and willows in soft ink wash, the broad sweep of the river in muted color, and the fireflies themselves as small bright accents scattered across the night. The painting belongs to a long Kyoto tradition of Uji-river nightscapes that Shōnen would return to repeatedly across his career, and that his pupil Uemura Shōen and later Kyoto Nihonga painters would extend in the early twentieth century.