Peach Blossom Spring

Gentai borrowed from the idioms of professional Chinese painting that were otherwise anathema to the amateur literati tradition. As a result, he developed a style previously unwitnessed in Edo painting. Peach Blossom Spring derives from a prose preface by Chinese poet Tao Yuanming (365–427), in which a fisherman chances upon a paradisal realm after passing through a cave hidden by blossoming peach trees. He returns home to tell others of his discovery, only to fail to find it again. Gentai’s rendering follows the ancient tradition of using azurite blue and malachite green to endow the mountains that shelter the utopian village with sacred meaning.