Himeji Castle

Himeji Castle (Burg Himeji in the German cataloguing literature) is a 1919 hanging-scroll painting by Tsuji Kakō in ink and color, depicting the great keep of Himeji-jō in present-day Hyōgo Prefecture — the largest surviving castle of the Japanese feudal period and a structure that by the early twentieth century had become one of the recognized emblems of Japanese historical architecture, undergoing the first systematic preservation campaign of the Meiji period from 1910 forward. Castle paintings (jōkaku-zu) had a long history in Japanese art, ranging from the great Azuchi-Momoyama-period screens of castles in mountain landscapes through the Edo-period topographic prints of the Tōkaidō stations, but by the Taishō period they had taken on a new resonance as records of a vanishing built heritage that the modernizing state was determined to preserve. Kakō's composition centers the white-plastered keep of Himeji against an atmospheric sky and surrounding mountain landscape, drawing on the Maruyama-Shijō habits of careful drawing and graduated washes that he had absorbed under his teacher Kōno Bairei. The scroll belongs to a recognizable group of his historical-architecture paintings of the 1910s and is one of the more frequently reproduced of his late-Taishō works.