Comes with the original double wooden tomobako storage boxes, the outer one in tamenuri lacquer and the inner one titled: Keizan yoku-u zu 渓山欲雨図 (Painting of Oncoming Rain in a Mountain Valley) and signed: Shunkyo jidai 春挙自題 (Inscribed by Shunkyo); sealed: Shunkyo 春挙
Painting signed at lower right Shunkyo 春挙; sealed Ittetsu Koji 一徹居士

Considered one of the most influential painters in and around Kyoto from the Meiji to the early Showa era, Yamamoto studied under Nomura Bunkyo (1854–1911)—from whom he received his art name Shunkyo—and Mori Kansai (1814–1894), two important artists whose master-pupil pedigrees can be traced back through two or three generations to, respectively, Matsumura Goshun (1752–1811) and Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795), founding fathers of naturalistic painting in Kyoto.

Shunkyo enjoyed early success, participating alongside such luminaries as Kikuchi Hōbun (1862–1918) and the great Takeuchi Seihō (1864–1942) in the Seinen Kaiga Kyōshinkai (Young Artists’ Association) and serving on its jury; showing his work at international events in Munich, Paris, and Chicago; and taking his first pupil in 1892. After Kansai’s death in 1894 Shunkyo became an independent artist and in 1899 was appointed Professor at Kyoto Municipal Art School. As well as playing a part in the founding of several of the artists’ groups that formed and reformed so often in later Meiji-era Kyoto, he set up his own painting academy, the Dōkōkai, in 1900 and showed regularly, first at the Bunten national exhibition from 1907 to 1916 and then at its successor the Teiten exhibition from 1922 until the year before his death in 1933. He was named Teishitsu Gigeiin (Artist to the Imperial Household, an honor broadly equivalent to today’s Ningen Kokuhō, “Living National Treasure”) in 1917, appointed to the Teikoku Bijutsuin (Imperial Art Academy) in 1919 and selected in 1928 for the special Shōtoku Taishi Commemorative Exhibition; in the same year he was commissioned to paint a pair of screens for the enthronement of the Showa Emperor. Sadly, his stellar career at the pinnacle of Japan’s official art system was cut short by his death at the relatively young of 61. A special exhibition devoted to his work was held at the Shiga Museum of Art in his native Ōtsu from April 23 to June 19, 2022.

Shunkyo’s artistic formation was unusually broad. Thanks to his two principal teachers, he was uniquely well versed in the eighteenth-century Kyoto Maruyama-Shijō style, a compelling synthesis of Western realism combined with East Asian media and brush techniques, but he was also a keen photographer, carrying cameras and other heavy equipment with him on his numerous mountain hikes (another of his passions) and devising and making his own chemical supplies for developing and printing. In addition, he took a close interest in European art, trying his hand at oil painting and learning from his celebrated painter friend Asai Chū (1856–1907) who returned from a two-year study visit to France in 1902.

His large-scale works, typically pairs of six-panel folding screens, were often majestic, mountain landscapes painted in vivid colors, but for the smaller hanging-scroll format, as here, Shunkyo often devised boldly cropped compositions that effectively suggest the majesty of the Japanese landscape at a much more modest scale. He mixed different shades of mineral green to represent the contrasting colors of the pale hillsides and dark pines and used tiny, impressionistic brushstrokes to depict two travelers on horseback making their way along a mountain track, dwarfed by nature in a manner that recalls Chinese landscape painting from many centuries earlier. A masterly evocation that combines innovative aspects of the Kyoto painting tradition with a revolutionary, globalist approach to composition and depiction, this is an outstanding demonstration of Shunkyo’s mature style.