Bright Moon Night

Bright Moon Night (Helle Mondnacht in the standard German-language reference cataloguing) is a 1912 hanging-scroll painting by Tsuji Kakō in ink and color, depicting a moonlit night scene with the kind of atmospheric handling of light and air that distinguishes his mature landscape work. The subject of moonlight had been a major motif of Japanese painting and poetry since the Heian period; by the Meiji and Taishō periods it remained one of the standard tests of a senior nihonga landscape painter, requiring the artist to render the subtle gradations of dark sky, illuminated cloud, and silvered ground while maintaining the close drawing of foreground trees, water, or architecture demanded by the Maruyama-Shijō tradition. Kakō's treatment in the 1912 painting applies the bokashi (graduated wash) technique he had learned under his teacher Kōno Bairei to the difficult tonal range of a night scene, and the composition reflects the wider late-Meiji and Taishō interest in atmospheric effect that was reshaping Japanese landscape painting under the indirect influence of Western pictorial practice. The scroll is one of his more frequently reproduced single-image landscape works and is documented in the international catalogue literature on the painter.