Autumn in Ohara (right screen)

Autumn in Ohara (大原の秋) is the right screen of a pair of folding screens by Tomita Keisen dating from 1921, depicting the rural village of Ōhara in the mountains northeast of Kyoto during the autumn season. Ōhara is one of the most poetically charged of the Kyoto-suburban landscapes: site of Jakkō-in (where the Heian empress Kenreimon-in took the tonsure after the destruction of the Taira at Dan-no-ura in 1185) and of Sanzen-in (one of the great Tendai monasteries of central Japan), and a longstanding destination for autumn maple viewing. Keisen's screen places the village under a canopy of maple foliage in red and gold, organized in the wide horizontal sweep characteristic of his screen compositions and rendered in the decorative idiom he had absorbed from the Rinpa tradition of Sōtatsu and Kōrin. Painted in his early forties and exhibited within the network of the Saikō Nihon Bijutsuin to which he had belonged since 1916, the work is a strong example of his mature treatment of Japanese landscape — observed from his Kyoto base, organized with nanga compositional sensibility, and finished with the colorist's care that the Kyoto nihonga world expected of its leading painters.