Mountain Market in Clearing Mist, from Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang

Mountain Market in Clearing Mist, from Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang (1788) is an album leaf in ink and color on paper by Tani Bunchō (谷文晁, 1763-1841), now remounted as a hanging scroll and held in the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1980.188.1). The leaf is part of Bunchō's 1788 album reimagining the Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang (瀟湘八景) — the canonical sequence of poetic landscape themes set along the Xiao and Xiang rivers in Hunan that Northern Song painters had codified in the eleventh century and that Japanese literati painters had absorbed as the central test piece of the Chinese landscape tradition. Bunchō was twenty-five when he produced the album; the painting demonstrates how thoroughly he had internalized the Ming and early Qing landscape repertoire he studied through copies in Edo collections, before his appointment to Matsudaira Sadanobu's service four years later established him as the leading nanga painter of his generation. The "Mountain Market in Clearing Mist" view — one of the eight named scenes — calls for a particular pictorial register: distant mountains emerging from rolling mist, a small settlement in the middle ground implied by a few rooftops and figures, and a quality of clearing weather conveyed through atmospheric ink wash. The album-leaf format, the restrained palette, and the Chinese-derived compositional logic place the sheet at the foundational moment of Bunchō's mature bunjinga manner. The Cleveland source confirms the 1788 date and the album's identity within Bunchō's documented early corpus.