Within this rectangular composition, the motifs recede diagonally from the lower left toward the upper right. Such oblique arrangements appear in several of Taiga’s early hanging-scroll landscapes. The present work, dated the year of hinoto-i (1767, Meiwa 4), was painted when he was forty-five. Compared with his youthful works—where sweeping waterscapes create a vivid sense of motion—here the motifs brim with vigorous, swelling vitality.

Taiga’s diagonal compositions are sometimes attributed to the influence of fan painting. Yet that alone cannot explain why he rarely employed such diagonals in horizontal formats. In this work, the motifs of the foreground appear relatively small, already taking on the quality of distant forms. Such a foreground is what one perceives when looking downward from a high mountain toward its foothills.

Taiga was a mountaineer. One of his sobriquets, Sangaku dōja (“Wanderer of the Three Peaks”), refers to his ascents of Mount Hakusan, Mount Tateyama, and Mount Fuji. From elevated heights the vista expands, widening as one looks into the distance. Yet in a vertical composition, simply placing the foreground below and extending upward into the distance does not create this sense of opening breadth. A diagonal recession, however, expands naturally, yielding a spacious and far-reaching vista.

Taiga’s mountaineering experience is evident also in his horizontal works. True View of Mount Asama exemplifies this, as do such notable pieces as The Lanting Gathering and the Longshan Gathering, an Important Cultural Property (Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art) and the set of four hanging scrolls Landscapes of the Four Seasons (Kyoto National Museum). In the left screen of the former, the distant plains and villages lie lower than the foreground where the literati assemble at Longshan (dragon mountain); likewise, in the spring and winter scenes of the latter, the middle ground is depicted lower than the foreground. Such compositional strategies have no clear precedent even in the Chinese literati paintings that Taiga studied. They remain strikingly fresh today and must have been revolutionary in his time. In this way, and in many others, Taiga transcended the conventional bounds of Nanga (“Southern Painting”).

The broad embankments dividing the paddies are one of Taiga’s hallmarks. The rice harvest is complete, and the stubble is rendered in dotted cinnabar. Two men carry sheaves of rice along the levee as they return home. In the foreground clearing, three figures thresh grain by striking it with long poles, while an elderly man, leaning on a staff, watches the work with a child at his side. A similar elderly figure appears in the scene of soaking seed rice in the four-seasons-of-agriculture motif. Comparable figures appear in Tachibana Morikuni’s Ehon Tsūhōshi, and further back in time in the folding screens attributed to Maejima Sōyū (Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History). The prototype seems to have featured a single elder. In the sliding-door paintings attributed to Kanō Yukinobu at Daisen-in, he stands alone, as he does in the copy of Liang Kai’s Album of Cultivation and Weaving (Tokyo National Museum), which became the model for Japan’s agricultural cycle imagery. In Taiga’s hands, however, the figures derived from the four-seasons-of-agriculture motif dissolve modestly into the landscape, gathering the blessings of nature’s energy as they labor within the expansive scene.

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.