Wintry Landscape with Trees

This intimate, miniature landscape painting—of the variety Uragami Shunkin’s famous father, Gyokudō, also sometimes created—captures the somber mood of a mountain village in late autumn at dusk. In a painting style learned from his father from an early age, employing repeating sharp horizontal strokes to build up the shapes of trees and peaks, the artist contrasts the textures of the rocky outcrops in the foreground with the dreamy mountain peaks in the distance. By the time he created this painting in 1833, Shunkin had already established himself as a Literati painter conversant in the related arts of poetry, calligraphy and playing the koto (Chinese: qin), the musical instrument that had been one of his father’s fortes. Shunkin, who was active in the intellectual and literary circle of Rai Sanyō (1780–1832) and others in Kyoto, also achieved a reputation as a connoisseur of antique paintings, calligraphies, inkstones, and metalwork, all of which he collected himself.

As he often did, Shunkin added a Chinese verse in his expert calligraphy to complement and poeticize this painting. Here he brushed four five-character lines that read:

木落泉源露
草枯山骨癯
冷々斜陽影
冷々斜陽影
層峰半有無

Fallen leaves reveal
the source of the stream
Withered grasses expose
the bones of the mountain
Cool diagonal shadows
are cast by the sinking sun.
Myriad peaks
are half hidden, half seen.

(Trans. Xiaohan Du)