The Poet Li Bo Gazing at a Waterfall

The Poet Li Bo Gazing at a Waterfall is a hanging-scroll painting by Tomioka Tessai depicting the Tang-dynasty Chinese poet Li Bo (701-762) in contemplative pose before a tall waterfall, executed in ink and color on silk. The subject, a standard motif of East Asian bunjinga (literati painting) derived from Li Bo's famous poem on the waterfall at Mount Lu, gave Tessai scope to deploy both the dramatic vertical landscape composition descended from the Northern Song masters and the figural-poet iconography descended from the great literati paintings of the Yuan and Ming. The figure of the poet is rendered with the rough, slightly caricatured energy that characterizes Tessai's mature figures, while the waterfall is built up with dense, broken-brushed ink and color in his late manner. The picture carries an extended inscription in classical Chinese, quoting Li Bo's poem in full and integrating image and text in the manner that defined the bunjin painting tradition for centuries. Works by Tessai treating the great Chinese poets — Tao Yuanming, Du Fu, Li Bo, Bai Juyi — form a substantial portion of his late oeuvre and were widely sought after by collectors of Japanese nanga from the 1910s onward.