Old Pine

A pair of six-panel folding screens dated 1900 and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art, depicting an aged pine across a continuous composition in ink, color, and gold on paper. The screens are among Shōnen's largest and most ambitious works in the pine-tree subject for which he was most celebrated. The trunk of the pine, weathered into a tortured shape over centuries, is worked in thick wet ink with the kind of physical force that contemporaries called daikyū — 'great madman' — brush. The clusters of needles are massed in dark green over a brilliant gold-leaf ground that suggests both daylight and an emblematic timelessness. Like the Aged Pines at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this pair belongs to a Sinophile pine iconography that Shōnen inherited from his father, Suzuki Hyakunen, and made his own at the height of his Meiji career.