Kyōsha fūshu (Sketches in the Narrow Lanes)

Kyōsha fūshu (literally "flavor of the narrow lanes," or more loosely "sketches from the back streets") is an ink-on-paper painting by Yamamoto Shunkyo, executed in his characteristic late ink-wash mode and reproduced in the major Kyoto-Osaka art journal Daimai Bijutsu no. 163 in 1935, two years after his death. The image shows a small group of figures and a pine in a quiet streetscape, drawn with the loose calligraphic brush and the restrained palette that Shunkyo had cultivated for his ink-wash work alongside his more formal color screens and scrolls. The Maruyama-Shijō tradition had always given a substantial place to ink-wash painting — Maruyama Ōkyo, Matsumura Goshun, and the school's nineteenth-century inheritors all worked across both ink-monochrome and full-color modes — and Shunkyo continued this practice throughout his career, producing ink paintings of small landscape and figure subjects in parallel with the large screens of Lake Biwa and the Shiobara gorge for which he is now best known. The Daimai Bijutsu reproduction is an important record of this side of his work, much of which survives only in private collections and in printed catalogues of the 1930s and 1940s.