Recesses of Shiobara (Autumn), panel 1

Recesses of Shiobara is the work that secured Yamamoto Shunkyo's standing at the highest level of late Meiji nihonga. The first of the four large panels in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo's set opens the composition on the right with a high near-foreground of rock outcrops, autumn-tinted maples, and pines clinging to a hillside above the Shiobara gorge in Tochigi Prefecture, north of Edo and a popular destination for educated tourists from at least the mid-Edo period onward. The Shiobara hot-spring villages and the river valleys of the surrounding Nasu mountains had been recommended subjects for landscape painting and for travel literature for more than a century, and Shunkyo's screen, painted in 1909, takes the location both as a literal record of his repeated sketching expeditions into the area and as a continuation of the Shijō school's long preoccupation with the Japanese mountain river valley as a model subject. The handling combines closely observed botanical detail in the foreground autumn leaves with the kind of atmospheric haze in the middle distance that Shunkyo had absorbed from his teachers Mori Kansai and Kōno Bairei, who had themselves inherited it from Maruyama Ōkyo's late eighteenth-century shasei landscape mode. The screens were exhibited at the third Bunten exhibition in 1909, where they won the highest prize for nihonga; the set was acquired into the imperial collection and later transferred to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, where it is registered as an Important Cultural Property.