Kiyomizu Temple in Autumn

Kiyomizu Temple in Autumn is an early work by Yamamoto Shunkyo, executed in ink and color on silk in 1891 when the painter was twenty years old and still completing his training under Mori Kansai. It is held by the Honolulu Museum of Art as part of the Richard Lane Collection, the substantial holdings of Japanese paintings and prints assembled by the scholar Richard Lane that entered the museum after his death in 2002. The composition shows the famous Kiyomizu-dera temple complex on the eastern hills of Kyoto, with its great stage projecting out over the maple-filled Otowa valley, framed against the autumn foliage. The temple was — and remains — one of the most heavily visited sites in Kyoto for the autumn maple-viewing (momijigari) season, and it was already a standard subject of Kyoto landscape painting and Meiji-period travel illustration by the time Shunkyo painted it. The work demonstrates his early command of the Shijō landscape mode: foreground maples observed with close botanical attention, middle-distance temple architecture set carefully into the slope, and the upper register of the silk left mostly bare to suggest atmospheric distance. It is among the small group of Shunkyo paintings in American museum collections and an important document of his student years.