Sealed at lower left Ritsuzan ga 立山畫 (Painted by Ritsuzan)

Melding diverse approaches to landscape, this awe-inspiring composition—executed in bold mineral colors including an unusually vivid blue--depicts a group of temple or shrine buildings—perhaps the world-famous Tōshōgū mausoleum to the north of Tokyo—half-hidden in a forest of giant cryptomeria trees. In a vallery in lower left of the screen is a small farming village. The central, layered, peak, reminiscent of many a Chinese or Japanese scroll where “further up” means “further away,” is foregrounded and surrounded by a broader landscape receding toward distant clouds, using a more recognizably Western perspective.

Born in Nishidan Town, Mihara District, Hyōgo Prefecture (present-day Minamiawaji City), Fudō Ritsuzan (birth name: Sadaichi 定一) studied at the Kyoto City School of Painting (now Kyoto City University of Arts) later entering the Seikōsha academy led by Nishiyama Suishō (1879–1958). He was first accepted at the official salons in 1912 (Sixth Bunten exhibition) and would continue to show his work regularly at the Bunten, Teiten, Shinbunten, and other prestigous exhibitions until 1939, in 1933 gaining the coveted mukansa status which granted exemption from the jury process; after the war he became a committee member for the Nitten (the successor to Shinbunten) but no longer exhibited. In 1942 he was evacuated to his native Awaji Island, not returning until 1963 to Kyoto, where he spent the rest of his career producing both traditional and contemporary genre scenes. During his earlier sojourn in Kyoto he adopted his maternal great-nephew Fudō Shigeya (1928–2016) who would go on to become a notable postwar artist specializing in abstract and mixed-media paintings (Shigeya’s great uncle was Kuribayashi Taizen, another Awaji-born artist whose work was recently acquired by Thomsen Gallery).

Fudō Ritsuzan’s early exhibition submissions usually include a significant figural and historicist element, but over time he began to produce fully-fledged landscape compositions, at first quite narrowly focused and specific but later more ambitious and panoramic. A framed panel in the collection of the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, dating from 1942, offers compositional parallels to the present screen. Both works show Fudō Ritsuzan at the peak of his powers despite wartime privations, with an impressively bold, monumental vision of his country’s mountainous landscapes and historic sites.

Reference
An early published figural work is Yoi, Natsu (Early Summer Evening), exhibited at the Tokyo Taisho exhibition in 1914, a work based on a seventeenth-century original by Kusumi Morikage; see Catalogue of Works Exhibited at the Tokyo Taisho Exhibition Gallery, Tokyo, Gahōsha 畫報社, 1914; and William Watson, The Great Japan Exhibition: Art of the Edo Period 1600–1868, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981, cat. no. 28.
For the 1942 panel, see www.momat.go.jp/collection/j00323.
For the connection to Fudō Shigeya, see www.tobunken.go.jp/materials/bukko/818911.html.