Bamboo

Like many women artists of the Edo period (1615–1868), Ike no Gyokuran received much of her artistic training and encouragement from her husband (the Nanga School painter Ike no Taiga). Nanga was the Japanese response to Chinese scholar paintings, where expressive brushwork and black ink or pale colors are favored over realistic detail and naturalistic coloring.

In this scroll, Gyokuran transcends the influence of both her teacher-husband and the Nanga tradition itself through her distinctive artistry and innovative composition in the recording of a bamboo plant, a traditional symbol of the gentleman-scholar in China and Korea, as well as Japan. Here, three phases of bamboo growth and decline—a pair of buds sprouting from the bottom of the scene, a mature plant filling the top of the composition, and a broken, dead trunk—are juxtaposed, creating a condensed, cyclical image. Each stage is layered over the previous, granting a sense of spatial depth to this otherwise flat composition.

Notice the distinctive brushwork that characterizes each stage of the plant: a wet brush saturated with dark ink renders the lush leaves and branches of the thriving stalk, while broad, dry strokes of equally intense ink compose the decaying fragment. Even the characters of the accompanying text in the painter’s undulating Japanese script evoke the brushed imagery of the bamboo.