Spring Sunrise at Hōrai

In a scene painted with the deliberately archaic “blue-and-green” palette evocative of landscape paintings of ancient China, small figures of scholars and attendants move in an idealized world of mountains, dwelling places, spring blossoms, and water. According to the artist’s title, it is a representation of Hōrai (Chinese: Penglai), the island and mountain of the immortals from Chinese mythology. The mountains, with their deep crevices and folds and vegetation rendered with repeated ink and color “dots,” are typical of landscape paintings of the Nanga (literati) school of the Edo period (1615–1868).

The artist, Tanomura Chokunyū, was the student and adopted son of Tanomura Chikuden (1777–1835), a major painter of the Nanga, or Literati, school. Although less well known than his adoptive father, Chokunyū—a philanthropist as well as a painter—is remembered for helping to establish Kyoto’s first art school, now known as the Kyoto City University of Arts (Kyoto Shiritsu Geijutsu Daigaku). He himself was a highly skilled painter in the Nanga tradition, specializing in landscapes executed in styles associated with renowned Chinese artists of the past, and scenes including representations of arhats (Jpn. rakan), semi-legendary disciples of Buddha popular in Zen Buddhist painting.