Ume Saku Niwa (Garden with Blossoming Plum)

Yajima Gōgaku's Ume Saku Niwa - garden with blossoming plum - is a literati landscape vignette in the nanga manner, depicting an enclosed Edo garden in which a thatched pavilion or country house shelters under flowering plum trees at the start of the new lunar year. The plum (ume) was the most charged of all bunjinga seasonal subjects: its blossoms appeared while snow still lay on the ground, and Chinese scholar-painting had for centuries read them as emblems of virtuous endurance and reclusive purity. Gōgaku's spare composition, with its open ground and confident calligraphic line, exploits the unprinted paper as a vehicle for atmospheric breath in the manner that nanga theory had inherited from Song and Yuan dynasty landscape practice. The small sheet, roughly 18 by 28 centimetres, was issued between 1818 and 1830.