Spring of Mountain (Okuyama no Haru)

Spring of Mountain (Okuyama no Haru) is a hanging scroll painting in color on silk by Yamamoto Shunkyo, dated 1933 — the year of his death — and held by the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, where it is one of the principal late works in the museum's collection of modern Japanese painting. The composition shows a deep mountain interior in the first days of spring: pines and bare deciduous branches climbing a gorge, a small waterfall in the middle distance, and a mist-bound layer of further mountains receding into the upper register of the scroll. Shunkyo's lifelong subject of the Japanese alpine landscape, organized as the experience of walking inward from a near foreground through a layered middle distance into atmospheric depth, is here distilled to its essential form. The scroll is conventionally cited as Shunkyo's last completed major work, painted in his sixty-second year, in the months before his death in Kyoto. It carries forward the Maruyama-Shijō landscape tradition he had absorbed from his teachers Mori Kansai and Kōno Bairei across a working life of half a century, and reads as a kind of summary statement of his approach to the mountain landscape.