Landscape

In his prime, the professional painter Kinoshita Itsuun was widely considered one of the "three great masters of Nagasaki," a nickname imparted partly for his skill at monochrome ink (suiboko) landscapes and in part for his towering physique. As a trading port city, Nagasaki was an exciting place for Japanese artists because of the great influx of Chinese paintings flowing into a country otherwise closed to outsiders by government restriction. Kinoshita took advantage of this situation to study firsthand imported originals, and even had the opportunity to study with traveling Chinese artist.

Part of Kinoshita’s artistic training involved mastering the many different historical styles of Chinese painting, sometimes by the imitative copying of his models and other times by painting in the manner of a recognized master. In this landscape featuring a mountainous landscape with stream and small boat in the foreground, Kinoshita interprets the style of the famed amateur scholar-painter Mi Youren (1086—1165), who was the son of the acclaimed literatus painter and calligraphy Mi Fu. Known for his so-called "ink play" or ximo—which favors an unassertive use of carefully graded ink washes that have the look of spontaneous marks spattered across the surface of the silk or paper surface—Mi Youren was celebrated in China, like his father, as one of the founding masters of the country’s famed scholar-painting tradition.