Landscape in Light Colors

Here, a vast "Chinese" landscape has been rendered in the small-scale format of a hanging scroll painting of modest dimensions. With layered mountains, bodies of water, a cascading mountain stream, and mist as the pictorial elements, the composition evokes similar but larger-scale landscape paintings by the Nanga-school master Yosa Buson. Typical of Buson’s style is the manner in which his use of ink with color washes and soft texture strokes endows an imposing mountain vista with an atmospheric, gentle lyricism. Also typical of his work is the suggestion of a meandering path in the middle ground that vanishes into mist. The forms of the mountains and distant peaks and crags, the delineation of tree foliage, and the application of ink dots along the outlines of the mountain folds, are indications of Buson’s familiarity with Chinese painting manuals like the seventeenth-century "Mustard Seed Garden Manual."

Buson, one of the most important and influential artists of the Nanga (Literati) school, was also a highly accomplished haikai poet and many of his paintings have a literary content. During his own lifetime he and his contemporary, Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–95), were recognized as the two leading painters of Kyoto, and he is generally regarded as the poet who restored the literary genre of haikai to the degree of excellence associated with the work of the great seventeenth-century poet Bashō (1644–1694).