Recesses of Shiobara (Autumn), panel 3

The third panel of Yamamoto Shunkyo's Recesses of Shiobara (1909) carries the composition through the deepest part of the gorge. The river bed widens, the rock walls thin out toward the middle distance, and the autumn maples give way to a layered mass of evergreens and bare upper slopes. Shunkyo's handling here repays comparison with the Maruyama-Shijō landscape paintings of his teachers Mori Kansai and Kōno Bairei: the panel works at sustained middle scale, with no single dominant motif, and asks the viewer to traverse it rather than to take in a single composed image. The screens were the centerpiece of the third Bunten exhibition in 1909, where Shunkyo's election to the founding nihonga jury and the award of the top landscape prize for this work effectively confirmed him as the leading Kyoto landscape painter of his generation. The work was acquired into the imperial holdings shortly after the exhibition and was later transferred to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, where the full set is preserved as an Important Cultural Property.