Landscape

Sōkei (sobriquet Gessen) was the son of Sōtan (1413–1481, lay surname Oguri), who was an official painter for the Ashikaga Shogunate. Sōkei started out as a Zen priest but returned to secular life in 1488 (Chōkyō 2) and devoted himself exclusively to a life of painting. It seems highly probable that Sōkei and Shabaku, whose name appears in contemporaneous compendiums of Japanese painters and painting history, were the same person.
The painting here is not only one of the few authentic works of Sōkei, it is also invaluable as the oldest, extant ink painting on fusuma (sliding doors). According to Inryōken nichiroku, the journal of the head monk of the Inryōken dormitory for the subtemple Rokuon-in of Shōkoku-ji Temple, Sōkei had completed six sliding-door panels of a landscape painting in the style of the Chinese Southern Song-dynasty court painter Xia Gui (1195–1224) for Yōtokuin (a subtemple of Daitoku-ji Temple) on the twenty-fifth day of the seventh month of Entoku 2 (1490). The work here is none other than these panels mentioned in this journal. They have been reformatted into four wide sliding panels, however, judging from traces of where the handles were formerly fitted, this work was originally mounted as five thinner panels.Sōkei’s idiosyncratic style is reflected in the somewhat edgy rendition of the cliff and boulders.