Landscape

On a moonlit night, a small boat carries its passengers toward a thatched lakeside pavilion as a bank of mist rolls through the craggy mountains. The faint traces of two seals on the lower left side of the scroll enable an attribution to Maejima Sōyū, a professional painter active in the castle-town of Odawara in eastern Japan and affiliated with a local branch of the influential Kano family of painters. Sōyū’s style owes a great deal to the family’s progenitor, Kano Masanobu (ca. 1434–ca. 1530), and he may have studied directly under Masanobu or his son, Kano Motonobu (1476–1559). A later copy in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum confirms that by the mid-nineteenth century the present work had come to bear an attribution to Masanobu. The two seals of Maejima Sōyū, which can be seen on another painting at the Met by this artist (2002.3), had already been effaced by this time, presumably to enable the attribution to his better-known teacher. The work was once part of a larger set of landscapes, probably eight or twelve scrolls total, of which five have survived and are held in various collections worldwide: the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin, the Chiba City Museum, and a private Japanese collection.