Landscape in the Moonlight

This dreamy moonlit landscape stretches across four fusuma sliding doors. Visible in the faint moonlight are boats floating on the quiet, waveless surface of a lake; a castle surrounded by a lush forest; and the shapes of mountains in the distance. The cliff that dominates right half of the picture towers above the clouds, while the fuzzy, somewhat nervous painting technique, together with the depiction of birds wheeling in the dark, hint at the bizarreness of Soga’s works. With his outstanding painting technique, applying ink in varying degrees of density and with brush strokes of varying intensity, he creates a greater variety of expressions than one would expect from a monochromatic ink painting. One masterpiece among the catalogue of works Soga made in his mid-thirties, this work has the initial roughness of the early stage of his developing painting style, while at the same time reflecting the artist’s acute sensitivity to the light of the moon.