This work featured in the Ike no Taiga Picture Book and Collected Works of Ike no Taiga (no. 332). The former notes the influence of Chinese painter Yi Fujiu (698–1747) and it describes the painting as “elegant.” Following on from this, the latter publication posits this as a work from Ike no Taiga’s late thirties and says it seems like a Yi Fujiu painting with its light colors and use of the shunpo (texture stroke) and tentai (dot) techniques, for example. The painting does indeed exude an air of ‘refinement.’ Unpainted blank space occupies a large part of the surface, for instance, while Taiga’s penchant for overexpression is also reined in. It resembles qianjiang (J. sengo) Chinese landscape paintings with its splashes of vermillion and indigo, though the colors are kept to a minimum, another aspect we could describe as ‘refined.’ However, this work cannot be defined solely by its ‘refinement.’

We see trees and a house nestled at the base of an acute triangular mountain. The left side of the craggy peak comprises several overlapping lumps of rock, with the scene exuding an ample sense of mass. Mountains like this are surprisingly common in Taiga’s works, though they are not formalized, which explains why they stand out less than the peaks in Uragami Gyokudo’s paintings.

The lumps of rock are expressed using a wide range of thin ink, with Taiga broadly eschewing the shunpo brush line technique. Taiga has either painted with the side of a regular brush or with a wide hake brush. Taiga also uses this form of expression for the folds of clothes, with his method closer to shading than shunpo.

The unique thing about this work is the depiction of the waterside. In regular sansui-ga (mountain and water painting), the mountains and rocks usually sit right next to the water. In this work, though, a white space sits between the foot of the mountain and the water’s edge. This is probably a sandy beach extending from the foreground to the yonder cove. We can also see small waves rippling against the beach.

The water is expressed in thin lines, with each line meticulously drawn. The waves are reminiscent of Autumn Moon Over Lake Dongting, Taiga’s masterpiece from the Clear Sounds Over the Eastern Hills album. The Japanese viewer will have encountered scenery like this somewhere and sometime. The gently lapping waves seem to create a hush and we can almost hear human voices emanating from the house. The white space at the foot of the mountain only adds to the stillness. This kind of sandy beach rarely appears in sansui-ga.

So how did such an uncommon form of expression come about? As mentioned above, the waves are reminiscent of Autumn Moon Over Lake Dongting, with this depiction certainly not rare for a Taiga work. In fact, this type of wave expression can also be found in Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, an ancient Chinese painting manual. Unfortunately, though, we have been unable to find other depictions of similar waves lapping a sandy shore. In any case, this exceptional form of expression appears completely natural, as if already in its completed form. We could say its emergence was only possible because of the way Taiga’s freewheeling genius was unconstrained by any particular painting method.

Ike no Taiga (literati painter; 1723–1776)
Literati painter, poet, and calligrapher from Kyoto. Taiga ran a fan shop while learning to paint by relying on the painting albums and compilations imported from China. At the same time, he received influence from the forefathers of the Japanese literati painting style, such as Yanagisawa Kien and Gion Nankai. He developed a rather original painting style, which gained him the high reputation of being the progenitor of the Nanga Painting.