Good Omen (Zuishō)

Good Omen (Zuishō) is a pair of two-panel folding screens by Yamamoto Shunkyo dated 1931, two years before his death, and is held by the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture, the museum founded by industrialist Adachi Zenkō with one of the most concentrated collections of modern Japanese painting in the country. The composition deploys an old pine tree — the canonical Japanese emblem of longevity and auspicious endurance — over a small foreground river of running water, with a young crane in the middle distance reading as the second part of a tsuru-matsu (crane-and-pine) pairing that classical Japanese decorative iconography had developed over centuries for use on New Year and ceremonial occasions. Shunkyo's late style is fully evident here: the pine bark and needle clusters are drawn with the close observational discipline of his Maruyama-Shijō training under Mori Kansai, while the gold-toned background and the spare placement of the crane and grass against generous negative space draw on the kind of decorative screen tradition Kyoto painters had inherited from the Rinpa and Kanō schools. The pair was painted in the year of his elevation to the senior rank of the Teikoku Bijutsuin and is one of the most-reproduced of his late ceremonial works.