Kinkakuji in Winter 冬景色の金閣寺 | Mori Kansai 森寛斎 | 1814-1894 (painted 1869)

Mori Kansai came from a samurai background, but he recognized the signs of the times and embraced the reshaping of Japan during the Meiji period (1868-1912). He thus considered himself (at times actively, which caused him difficulties) part of the "Imperial camp." He painted this picture in 1869, a year after the start of the Meiji Restoration. This new era of profound change (especially in painting through its confrontation with European art) left little mark on him. Until the end of his life, he remained fundamentally true to the old aesthetic values ​​and rarely experimented.

The subject here is one of Kyoto's most magnificent winter scenes. The "Golden Pavilion," as Kinkakuji is known in the West, remains a must-see for every Kyoto tourist. The setting is indeed highly impressive, as the pavilion is nestled within a splendid landscaped garden featuring a pond and a so-called "borrowed landscape" ( sh akkei ) of the mountains behind it. This very point reveals how little Mori Kansai cared about a "correctly realistic" veduta, that is, how much he romanticized the entire scene. The large mountain range behind the pavilion is (even taking into account the painter's vantage point) far too high. It serves as a means to suggest monumentality and vastness. The flock of birds flying away above, which become progressively smaller towards the top of the picture, contributes to the effort to make the viewer sense "infinite depth".

The pavilion's sense of enclosure by surrounding pine trees is likely a product of artistic imagination – at least nowadays, no tall pines rise behind the building. With such poetic rendering, the painter follows firmly in the footsteps of his great role model, Maruyama Ōkyō (1733-1795), who rarely contented himself with mere realism.

But one detail goes beyond Maruyama and reveals him as a connoisseur of the new stylistic devices of his time: snow was generally depicted simply by omitting a layer of paint, meaning the light background had to create the snowy effect. This is also the case here, but the artist was determined to paint some snowflakes as well, which isn't possible with the omission technique. And so he added white dots afterward using chalk-white paint. Such use of snow-white paint was fashionable at the time; it's only found among the "avant-garde" artists of the Meiji period—which, in principle, Mori Kansai didn't want to be.