West Lake

West Lake (西湖図) is a six-panel folding screen of 1909 by Tomita Keisen, executed in ink and gold on paper and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art. The subject is the celebrated West Lake (Xihu) at Hangzhou in eastern China, the canonical landscape of Chinese literati culture and the setting of centuries of poetry by Su Dongpo, Bai Juyi, and their successors. Keisen treats the lake through the compositional habits of the nanga (Chinese-derived literati) tradition, organizing pavilions, willows, and the famous Su Causeway across the breadth of the six panels and setting the whole composition against a gold-ground sky that places the screen within the Kyoto decorative practice descended from Sōtatsu and Kōrin. Painted in his thirtieth year, the work is one of his earliest mature statements of the literati-meets-Rinpa idiom that would define his career, and it reflects the years he spent in Kyoto and Nagasaki absorbing nanga models under Tsuji Kakō and Kinoshita Itsuun. As a screen of an explicitly Chinese subject by a Japanese painter committed to nanga revival, it sits in a long tradition of Japanese painters of Chinese landscapes that includes Ike no Taiga, Yosa Buson, and Tomioka Tessai, and it shows Keisen working in a direct, full-scale way with that lineage.