Mount Emei

Pilgrims on horseback, accompanied by servants, make their way up the winding and precariously steep paths on Mount Emei in Sichuan, China. Snow is falling, as suggested by the splattered gofun (oyster shell pigment). The title on the painting 蛾[峨]眉積雪 refers to Mount Emei (Emei-shan 峨眉山), in Sichuan, China—one of the Four Great Sacred Mountains of China—some 3,099 meters high. Two of its peaks are said to resemble emei or omei 蛾眉, a “moth’s eyebrows” or antennae. The monastery shown in the painting atop the peak, Guangxiangsi 光相寺, is dedicated to Samantabhadra, the bodhisattva of virtue.

Mount Emei is a suitable painting topic for a literati artist like Kinkoku since it was topic of several famous poems by the Tang poet Li Bai (701–762); for example see the set of screens by Shiokawa Bunrin memorializing the moonlit mountain (1998.189.1, .2). It is also connected to the dangerous, ancient “Road to Shu” (Shudao) planks, immortalized by Li Bai as being harder to ascend than the path to heaven. Kinkoku painted other versions of this painting, including one dated to the artist’s seventieth year, 1730, near the end of his life.

Kinkoku was a multifaceted artist; not only a painter and poet, but was skilled as a sculptor, seal engraver, potter, and practitioner of martial arts—one of few Japanese literati painters whose lifestyle was actually close to the free and untrammeled Chinese ideal of the scholar-artist. Born in Ōtsu, just to the east of Kyoto, he trained as a monk of the Pure Land (Jōdo) sect and in the 1780 served as the abbot of Gokurakuji on Mount Kinkoku in Kyoto (from which he took one of his art names), but then became a wandering artist-ascetic. He was strongly influenced by the work of Yosa Buson, but developed his own rougher, individual style, influenced by other Bunjin painters.

Kinkoku was also an enthusiastic adherent of the Shugendō mountain-climbing religious sect, and was earlier awarded the ecclesiastical rank of Hōin (“Seal of the Law”)—used in the signature of this painting—in 1804 (or 1809 according to some sources), which Kinkoku received from the Imperial Court after serving in the ceremonial axe-bearer role (On-ono-yaku) during the 1804 pilgrimage led by Kōen 高演 (1765–1848), a Shingon monk with relatives active in the palace. This painting may be obliquely referring to the rigors of mountain climbing that was part of Shugendō practice.