Five-Storied Pagoda at Nikkō (Nikkō no gojū no tō)
日光の五重の塔
by Uehara Konen
- Date:
- c. 1900-1910
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print
日光の五重の塔
by Uehara Konen
This Library of Congress impression (LC 2008660506) of Nikkō no gojū no tō (Five-Storied Pagoda at Nikkō) is one of Uehara Konen's most architecturally precise landscape designs. The composition centers on the great red lacquered pagoda of Nikkō, its five tiered roofs rising against a background of dark pines and a paler distant sky. Konen modulates the palette around the dominant cinnabar of the lacquered pagoda, surrounding it with a deep forest green and a cool grey-blue sky, with the carved white phoenix and dragon ornament at each cornice picked out in a separately registered key block. The drawing of the architectural detail — the curving eaves, the bracket complexes, the ornament at the kasagi — is unusually exact for a small-format print, and reflects Konen's training in Maruyama-Shijō close-observational drawing under Suzuki Kason. The treatment of the surrounding pines is handled in a softer manner, with the foliage carried by flat washes rather than individually delineated needles, an approach that gives the great architectural mass at the center its proper visual weight. The print belongs to the early Meiji-Shōwa group of Konen's work preserved in the Library of Congress holding and is among the strongest small-format treatments of Nikkō's most photographed structure from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Five-Storied Pagoda at Nikkō (Nikkō no gojū no tō) (日光の五重の塔) was created by Uehara Konen (上原古年) in c. 1900-1910.
Five-Storied Pagoda at Nikkō (Nikkō no gojū no tō) depicts pagodas.
