High Mountains, Flowing Water: Yu Boya and Zhong Ziqi
Okura Ryūzan Japanese
Not on view
This combination of landscape and figures, with a clearly Chinese theme, contains a vertical arrangement of narrow, block-like mountain forms and a grove of trees, bamboo, and banana plants. Within the grove sit two gentlemen, one of whom rests on an ornamental rock as he plays the qin (a zitherlike stringed instrument). The two are accompanied by a servant boy, who fans the fire in a small stove upon which tea is being prepared. The landscape elements were executed in the bluish green palette meant to evoke ancient Chinese landscape paintings.
Ōkura Ryūzan, the son of a Yamato peasant, came to move in the same literary circles as the influential philosopher and poet Rai San'yō (1780–1832) and several prominent Nanga school artists, including Nakabayashi Chikutō (1776–1853). Both Ryūzan and his wife, Shūran, were students of Chikutō, and Ryūzan’s landscape paintings display a delicacy of color and brushwork reminiscent of his teacher’s.
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