Bamboo under the snow 雪の竹 | Hashimoto Gahō 橋本雅邦 | 1835-1908

Hashimoto Gahō was one of the avant-garde figures of the late 19th century. The Meiji period began in 1868, a time of upheaval on a cultural, social, and political level. These were the years of an almost violent intrusion of Western civilization into an island nation that had decisively isolated itself from the outside world for 250 years and had been forced to open up by the Americans in 1854.

In Japan, where painting had a magnificent tradition, the arrival of European art was overwhelming, but also dangerous. Should young painters now only create works in the style of French Romanticism, German Classicism, or some other academic Western tradition? Many did so with astonishing skill in a very short time.  

But painters like Hashimoto Gahō thought a step further; their goal was to renew and develop Japanese painting from within. Simply continuing within one of the old Japanese styles was not the solution for Japan's aesthetic survival. They sought to expand the wealth of motifs, to reformulate classical motifs, to breathe new life into old techniques, or even to experiment with European oil paints.

This bamboo painting clearly has a classical Japanese basis: the tradition of painting bamboo is ancient and considered the foundation of Asian brush painting in general. There is also a tradition of painting snow, but in both areas, Gahō explores different approaches here.

Initially, only the bamboo leaves are painted in a traditional style – they differ in no way from old depictions. What is striking, however, is the absence of visible clumps, which actually constitute the symbolic meaning of this plant (unparalleled flexibility and resilience). Even more strikingly new is the treatment of the snow: In old paintings, white snow is not actually painted, that is, it is merely depicted as an area not covered by a shadow of color, but remains unpainted. While this is also the case here on the underside of the clumps, the painter takes pleasure in defining the masses of snow lying on the leaf tufts with strong, defined lines. They are decidedly decorative and therefore also quite unrealistic.  

The interplay of the lanceolate bamboo leaves with their sharp points, which playfully interact with the soft curves of the snow cover profile, seems to be the driving force behind this depiction of bamboo for this painter – but such joy is a completely new kind of pleasure in the treatment of this motif.