Soken Landscape Picture Album (Soken sansui gafu) 素絢山水画譜

Soken Landscape Picture Album (Soken sansui gafu, 素絢山水画譜), dated 1818, is the landscape volume of Yamaguchi Soken's (山口素絢, 1759-1818) published picture-album corpus, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession recorded at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/78719). The 1818 date places the album in the year of Soken's death and thus among his final publications, the culmination of the sequence that had run from the Yamato jinbutsu gafu of 1800 through the plant volume of 1807 to this concluding landscape (sansui) volume. Soken was a leading pupil of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795) whose Kyoto-based studio had reformed Japanese painting in the late eighteenth century toward closer observation of the natural world, drawing on imported Western pictorial techniques (perspective, chiaroscuro) and Chinese painting models alike. The Maruyama-school landscape was different in temperament from contemporary bunjinga: where the literati painters of Kyoto and Osaka such as Ike no Taiga, Uragami Gyokudō, Okada Beisanjin, and Aoki Mokubei worked from the deliberately untutored scholar-amateur brush idiom inherited from Chinese literati sources, the Maruyama-school landscapist was more directly committed to topographic observation and to the modeling of recession by tonal means. Soken's landscape album would offer the published expression of that observational tradition, with woodblock-printed pages preserving the careful brushwork of his designs as instructional and connoisseurial reference. Issued in the year of his death, the album would have stood as a kind of late artistic testament.