Shohaku Cat.42

42. Twelve Landscapes
Soga Shohaku (1730 –1781)
Pair of six-panel folding screens (independent compositions on each panel); ink on paper
Kyoto National Museum
Signed: (R) and (L), on each panel: Shohaku hitsu
Seals: (R) and (L) on each panel: Jasokuken Shohaku, Shiryo, Soga

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Label

Spring and summer landscapes, By Soga Shohaku (1730–1781), Six-panel folding screen from a pair of six-panel screens of twelve landscapes, ink on paper, Kyoto National Museum

In this six-panel folding screen, Shohaku portrays varied weather in spring and summer, including rounded mountain peaks fading in mist, a heavy spring downpour at the foot of an extremely tall mountain, and mist rising in valley after rain in summer. The scenes reflect Shohaku’s interest in the constantly shifting faces of the natural world.

Shohaku creates different moods through brush techniques of monochrome ink painting. In the first panel from the right, for example, he constructs groups of rounded mountains with repeated horizontal dots. In other images, such as the second and third landscapes from the right, he employs ax-cut strokes (strokes made by pulling the side of the brush across the surface of the paper at an oblique angle), to render the crystal clear forms of the cliffs.

Near the end of his life Soga Shohaku, who had been a painter of bold and sometimes almost violent style, turned his attention to landscapes painted in a more controlled mode. Forms are flattened and carefully drawn in thin lines. What make these landscapes distinctive of Shohaku are the bizarre shapes of their elements, which soar amidst cool, surreal atmospheres.

NOTE: This screen [above] will be replaced with the companion six-panel folding screen of autumn and winter landscapes [below] on February 6.

Autumn and winter landscapes, By Soga Shohaku (1730–1781), Six-panel folding screen from a pair of six-panel screens of twelve landscapes, ink on paper, Kyoto National Museum

In this six-panel folding screen, Shohaku portrays varied weather in autumn scenes with pavilions and winter landscapes of heavy snowfall. The scenes reflect Shohaku’s interest in the constantly shifting faces of the natural world.

Shohaku creates different moods through brush techniques of monochrome ink painting, depicting a rising harvest moon in the second panel from the right and the frozen silence of winter in the fifth and sixth panels from the right. To create the illusion of heavy snowfall in winter landscapes he leaves hills and banks in reserve (that is, unpainted), defining their contours only with surrounding areas of gray wash.

This screen is one of the best examples of Shohaku’s landscape style, which he developed near the end of his life. In contrast to the bold and almost violent style of his earlier years, here these landscapes are painted in a more controlled mode with carefully rendered flattened forms.

Catalog [all twelve]

In twelve breathtaking landscapes, each a complete work of art in its own right, Soga Shohaku explores worlds of light, weather, and seasonal mood in ink monochrome. First exhibited less than a year ago, this newly discovered pair of folding screens illuminates an aspect of Shohaku’s art that is often overlooked, namely, the artist’s virtuosity as a painter of restrained, lyrical images that seem the antithesis of his better-known freely expressive idiom (see Four Sages of Mount Shang, cat. no. 43). Above all, these landscapes show Shohaku’s stylistic debt and artistic devotion to monochromatic ink painting of the Muromachi period (1392–1573).

Sets of paintings of landscapes or other subjects affixed to the separate panels of paired folding screens were produced beginning in the Muromachi period, and remained an appealing format for their combination of discrete images within the large surfaces of folding screens.[Ref. 1] This type of artwork (called oshiebari byobu in Japanese) seems to have been derived from earlier practices of mounting monochrome hanging scroll paintings on folding screens.[Ref. 2] Like these earlier works, Shohaku’s screens assemble imagery portraying varied weather in each of the four seasons, including a heavy summer downpour, mist rising in valleys after a rain, and fading light on an autumn evening in the right screen, and a rising harvest moon and the frozen silence of winter in the left screen. Shohaku also produced large, continuous landscapes on folding screens, but in no work does he delve as deeply into the constantly shifting faces of the natural world as in these Twelve Landscapes.[Ref. 3]

Each of the Twelve Landscapes shows Shohaku to be the consummate technician of monochrome ink painting; the works can be viewed as a digest of the diverse brush modes available to Japanese painters. In the first panel in the right screen, for example, Shohaku constructs three groups of rounded mountains with repeated Mi dots, derived ultimately from the Northern Song dynasty painters Mi Fu and Mi Youren. Other images, such as the second and third landscapes in the right screen employ ax-cut strokes, another brush mode with origins in Song-dynasty painting, to render clear, crystalline forms. In the left screen’s winter landscape Shohaku creates the illusion of heavy snowfall by leaving hills and banks in reserve, defining their contours only with surrounding areas of gray wash. In the image of ascending mists in the right screen, Shohaku abandons conventional brushwork altogether to conjure clouds from spreading washes of light gray ink. By Shohaku’s time, typologies of brushstrokes were thoroughly absorbed into Japanese painters’ technical vocabulary; in Twelve Landscapes Shohaku demonstrates both his mastery of these modes and his ability to extend beyond their limits.

Little is known about Shohaku’s early career and artistic training, but according to one theory, he received painting instruction from Takada Keiho (1674–1756).[Ref. 4] Keiho was the student of Kano Eikei (1662–1702), whose father, Kano Eino, authored Japan’s first historical painting treatise, Honchogashi (History of Painting in This Realm).[Ref. 5] Through theseassociations it becomes possible to see Shohaku as a painter who had access to a wealth of historical knowledge about Japanese painting. Moreover, through Takada Keiho’s links to the academic Kyoto Kano lineage, Shohaku would also be connected indirectly to Kano Eino’s father, Sansetsu (1589 –1651), whose mannered landscape forms are echoed in many of Shohaku’s paintings, and with whose style name, “Jasokuken,” Shohaku frequently signed his works.[Ref. 6]

Like Sansetsu and Eino’s images, Shohaku’s works exhibit a keen interest in styles and historical themes in which Muromachi-period painters excelled. Twelve Landscapes, for example, features references to the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, a series of poetic scenes of two rivers in south China that were popularized in Muromachi-period painting. In Shohaku’s images, the descending geese in the fourth panel of the left screen allude to “Geese Descending among Reeds,” while the heavy shower in the right screen refers to “Night Rain at Xiao Xiang.” Shohaku thus folds into his Twelve Landscapes layers of historical and literary associations that reflect his training and knowledge of Japan’s artistic past.

1. A pair of folding screens by Kano Motonobu in the Freer Gallery of Art, Chinese Landscapes on Flowers and Grasses of the Four Seasons, is one of the oldest extant examples. For an illustration, see Kyoto Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, ed., Muromachi jidai no Kanoha: gadan seiha e no michi (Tokyo: Chuo Koron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1999), 138–141.

2. Prince Fushimi Sadafusa (1372–1456) mentions in his diary, Kanmon gyoki, two pairs of screens with seven scrolls hung over them for the Star Festival in 1432. See Kawai Masatomo, “Reception Room Display in Medieval Japan,” in Nicole Rousmaniere, ed., Kazari: Decoration and Display in Japan 15th–19th Centuries (New York: Japan Society, 2002), 33.

3. Perhaps Shohaku’s most spectacular landscape painting is his Moonlit Landscape, a pair of folding screens in Omi Jingu, Shiga Prefecture. Conceived on the grand scale of the screens’ twelve panels, this work nevertheless lacks the inner cohesion of each of the images in his Twelve Landscapes screens. For an illustration, see Kyoto Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, Soga Shohaku, cat. no. 3, 61– 69.

4. The documentary links between Shohaku and Keiho are tenuous, resting solely on Nakabayashi Chikuto’s 1802 treatise, Chikutogaron, where they are mentioned together twice in the same passage. See Money Hickman, “Soga Shohaku,” trans. Egami Yasushi, in Tsuji Nobuo, Kono Motoaki, and Money Hickman, eds., Jakuchu, Shohaku, Nihon bijutsu kaiga zenshu, v. 23 (Tokyo: Shu - eisha, 1981), 113–114.

5. Money Hickman, “Soga Shohaku,” 113–114.

6. Tsuji Nobuo, Kiso no keifu: Matabei-Kuniyoshi (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1970), 85. For a study of Kano Sansetsu’s paintings on Chinese subjects, see Matthew McKelway, “Autumn Moon and Lingering Snow: Kano Sansetsu’s West Lake Screens,” Artibus Asiae LXII : 2 (2002): 33–80.