Soken Landscape Picture Album (Soken sansui gafu)

Soken Landscape Picture Album (素絢山水画譜, Soken sansui gafu), published in Kyoto in Bunsei 1 (1818) — the year of the artist's death — is Yamaguchi Soken's final printed album and the landscape companion to his earlier figure and plant books. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's copy (accession 2013.829a, b) preserves the complete two-volume set as a woodblock-printed book with ink and selective hand-coloring on volume two, a finishing technique that gives the landscape plates a quiet color register without the labor of full multi-block color printing. Across the album's plates Soken surveys the standard Maruyama-Shijō landscape repertoire — pine groves, mountain villages, river scenes, fishing boats, waterfalls, distant temples, and traveler subjects — composed in the long-diagonal, asymmetric manner that the school had codified through Ōkyo and Goshun. The drawing reflects Soken's mature ehon style: clear ink contours, deliberately limited tonal range, and compositions that read as both observed views and meditations on the conventions of Japanese landscape painting. As the last of Soken's three major printed albums, the Soken sansui gafu rounds out his survey of figure, plant, and landscape subjects, and together the three sets constitute the most complete record of his draftsmanship.