Mountains and River (scroll II)

A companion to its sister scroll in the Freer Gallery of Art Study Collection, this large hanging scroll shows a related valley landscape from a different vantage, the river arcing across the lower register and the mountains rising in misted strata above. Hokkai's handling of vegetation here is unusually species-specific for a literati landscape: groves of conifers in the middle distance are differentiated by silhouette and branch habit from the deciduous hardwoods clustered along the river plain, a botanical precision that betrays his forestry training. The two scrolls together demonstrate the way he used the Nanga convention of paired or grouped landscapes to assemble what amounts to a small visual survey of a single mountain region.