Landscape

Kano Tanyu was an accomplished master in black ink painting in the Chinese manner, a foreign style that had been transformed in the previous century by Japanese amateur, professional, and Zen painters into a local idiom called haboku-ga or “broken-ink painting.” In this austere view of one of Japan’s most famous topographic features— Mount Fuji and environs—the razor-sharp edges of Tanyu’s rapidly brushed ink washes establish only generalized shapes of mountain peak and ocean view below. While some of the paper is left blank, most areas are covered with the palest washes of diluted black ink to suggest mist, clouds, water, or sky (possibly at night or during winter). At the lower right, darker areas of semi-transparent gray wash and opaque black brushstrokes define a temple pagoda. Low buildings are partially hidden behind rounded cliffs and a boat moored on the shoreline of Suruga Bay. The natural beauty and evocative treatment of this landscape recall the classical Chinese theme of the Eight Views of the Xiao-Xiang River (a remote scenic district in China), which had been popularized in poetry and painting during the Southern Song dynasty (960–1279). In choosing the unmistakable shape of one of his country’s most iconic natural sites as the focal point of the composition, however, Tanyu transformed this foreign genre into a thoroughly Japanese landscape.