Mountains Dyed Red by Autumn Foliage

This work depicts autumn foliage on mountains by the water’s edge looking “redder than if painted with rouge.” Gyokudo (1745–1820) served as a samurai in Okayama but liked to play the koto and at the age of 50 he left his clan to devote himself to the arts, roaming the country from Aizu (Fukushima) to Nagasaki. Like this work, which is signed “produced by Gyokudo while drunk,” many of the paintings he produced supposedly for his own enjoyment were completed while imbibing alcohol. Within the picture plane of this horizontal hanging scroll, gently sloping mountains have been rendered using a dry brush, with leaves and moss dots on the trees on the mountains and the water’s edge in the foreground painted in red and yellow. With its bright colors, this beautiful work is unusual among Gyokudo’s oeuvre of mainly ink-wash paintings.