Waterfall

Waterfall is a color woodblock print after a design by Yamamoto Shunkyo, dated to about 1900 and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 27553). The composition shows a vertical waterfall dropping through a rocky mountain interior, with pines clinging to the surrounding cliffs — one of the standard mountain landscape subjects of the Maruyama-Shijō school that Shunkyo had absorbed through Mori Kansai. Reproduction prints of senior Kyoto Shijō painters' landscape designs were a substantial part of the late Meiji book and print trade: studios in Kyoto produced color woodblock versions of paintings by Shunkyo, Takeuchi Seihō, Kikuchi Hōbun, Kōno Bairei, and others for the domestic art-instruction market and for export to the slowly emerging Western collecting world. The Honolulu copy entered the museum's collection in the early twentieth century and has remained one of the more frequently consulted Shunkyo print holdings in any American collection. The print is small, technically refined in its handling of the gradated water and rock, and useful as a record of the way Shunkyo's painting designs were translated into the medium of color woodblock printing in the years of his rising national reputation.