Landscape

The painter of this Chinese literati-style landscape benefited from firsthand study of Chinese paintings in the collection of the Nagoya merchant Kamiya Tenyu. During this period in Japan, government policy limited contact with the outside world. As a result Japanese artists did not have a full picture of current Chinese painting styles and relied instead on block-printed manuals for their knowledge of Chinese compositional and brushwork methods. This artist was fortunate to be taken under Kamiya's wing and to study his collection.
In the foreground of the painting two small figures in Chinese garments stand in a remote mountain setting. Tall trees next to the figures serve to carry the eye up, past a hermitage in front of a rocky stream, to distant towering cliffs, from which a waterfall descends. The inscription at the top of the painting states that it was brushed on a rainy night in late spring by Yamamoto Baiitsu, an artist from Nagoya.