Plums, Bamboo, and Orchid

Plums, Bamboo, and Orchid is a hanging scroll by Yamamoto Baiitsu in ink on silk, dated 1834 and held by the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1975.93). The painting brings together three of the so-called "Four Gentlemen" (shikunshi) of Chinese literati painting — plum (ume), bamboo (take), and orchid (ran) — and omits the fourth, chrysanthemum, in favor of a three-element composition that allows each motif its own register of the tall vertical silk. The Four Gentlemen, taken individually or in groups, were the basic vocabulary of literati painting throughout East Asia from the Song dynasty forward, each carrying its own ethical meaning: plum for the resilience that flowers in cold, bamboo for the supple steadfastness of bent-but-unbroken character, orchid for the secluded purity of the scholar who lives modestly. Painted in Baiitsu's fifty-first year, the work demonstrates his mature command of the "boneless" (mokkotsu) wash and of the calligraphic dry-brush idiom inherited from Yuan and Ming Chinese painting. The Cleveland scroll measures 172 x 79 cm in the painting alone (about 253 x 105 cm with its mounting) and entered the museum's collection through the William H. Marlatt Fund in 1975. It is among the canonical Baiitsu paintings in American museum holdings and was included in Cleveland's exhibition Suibokuga: Japanese Ink Painting.