Rocks and Stream

Rocks and Stream is a mid-nineteenth-century hanging scroll painting by Yokoyama Seiki in ink and color on silk, depicting a vertical landscape of weathered rocks alongside a running stream. The composition is characteristic of Seiki's Shijō-school landscape practice: the rocks are observed for their geological form and rendered in the school's controlled ink washes and softened outline, the water is suggested by the careful absence of ink rather than by elaborate decorative pattern, and the whole composition is built around the kind of long vertical recession that Maruyama Ōkyo and his successors had inherited from Chinese landscape models and adapted to Kyoto taste. The Minneapolis Institute of Art copy (2013.31.17) was acquired through the John R. Van Derlip Fund from the collection of Elizabeth and Willard Clark and is signed at lower right and impressed with the artist's seal Ko-ki. Rocks and Stream documents the broader pictorial range of an artist who is best known today for his small-format kachō-e surimono but who, like all senior Kyoto painters of his generation, was expected to work fluently across the major formats of his school. The painting's overall mood of quiet observation is closely related to the literati landscape tradition the Shijō school engaged with throughout the late Edo period.