Summer Mountains

Summer Mountains is a hanging-scroll landscape painting by Tomioka Tessai in ink and color on paper, depicting a dense range of summer mountains in the bunjinga (literati painting) tradition. The picture displays Tessai's characteristic late brushwork: rough, broken lines building the volumes of the peaks; dense applications of green and blue mineral color in the foreground vegetation; passages of pale wash receding into the upper picture; and an extended inscription in classical Chinese that integrates the image with the literary tradition of summer-mountain poetry descended from the Song dynasty masters. Tessai produced numerous variations on the four-seasons landscape over his long career, in part because the subject offered an opportunity to draw simultaneously on Chinese nanga theory (with its codified ink-and-color techniques for each season) and on his own decades of travel and sketching across the Japanese countryside. Summer-mountain compositions in particular gave him scope for the densely worked surfaces and saturated color that distinguish his late style from the more austere and ink-dominated landscape painting of earlier Edo-period Japanese nanga masters such as Ike no Taiga and Yosa Buson.