Moonlit Landscape

One of the most skillful and stylistically diverse ink painters of the late Edo period, Nagasawa Rosetsu has conjured up a moody, atmospheric scene of a mountain landscape illuminated by a moon, rendered in reserve. Wisps of cloud moving across the sky evoke a slightly eerie feeling and call to mind the representation of imaginary dragons of East Asian lore by Rosetsu and others. The bold silhouettes of pine trees contrast with gray washes created using a tsuketatefude 付立筆, a wide brush with long, flexible bristles, to create the contours of the mountainside without outlines. The painting would have been executed in multiple stages, allowing each layer of ink wash to completely dry before the next was applied. The upper expanse of the painting is entirely blank, except for the artist’s signature—cursorily inscribed with a moist brush—and the red accent of his double seal. The exaggeratedly elongated manner of writing Ro 蘆 of his name, as if it comprised two separate characters 艹 and 庵, is a frequently encountered idiosyncrasy of his late-career signature style.

Images of moonlit landscapes were a favorite subject of the artist’s oeuvre from the earliest stages of his career, as attested by the paintings attached to a pair of screens in The Met’s collection (1975.268.72, .73), right up until the end of his career, as demonstrated here. During the last five or so years of his life, beginning when he was travelling to Hiroshima and Itsukushima (site of a famous Shinto shrine) in 1794, he created several permutations of the theme of a full moon with clouds. The most famous example is preserved by the Egawa Museum of Art in Hyōgo prefecture, and two variations on the theme have in recent years entered the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (acc. nos. 2015.79.164; 2013.31.35). In the former, a pine tree in grey wash is silhouetted directly again the moon; in the Minneapolis examples abstract cloud formations resemble a dragon ascending to the heavens or hover over obscured mountain cliffs.