Beauty and the Thunder God

Beauty and the Thunder God is a pair of hanging scrolls by Yamamoto Shunkyo dated 1904, executed in ink and color on paper. The composition pairs a kneeling court beauty with the figure of Raijin, the Japanese god of thunder, traditionally depicted as a horned demon-figure with a circle of drums around his shoulders. The pairing belongs to a long iconographic tradition of fūjin-raijin (wind- and thunder-god) painting, descending from medieval Buddhist iconography through the great seventeenth-century screens by Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Ogata Kōrin, and into the Edo and Meiji period as a subject for both ceremonial paintings and theatrical illustration. Shunkyo's treatment is unusual within his oeuvre — he was primarily a landscape painter, and figurative work of this kind is comparatively rare — but it demonstrates his command of the full Kyoto nihonga repertoire he had absorbed from his teachers Mori Kansai and Kōno Bairei, and his comfort with the kind of dramatic mythological subject that Meiji audiences expected of a senior painter. The pair was painted at the moment when Shunkyo's reputation was being established in the national exhibitions and stands as an early demonstration of his range outside the landscape mode for which he is now best known.