Seascape | Hashimoto Gahō 橋本雅邦 | 1835–1908 (1905) | Kawai Gyokudō 川合玉堂 | 1873-1957

Hashimoto Gahō is considered one of the great innovators of Japanese painting at the end of the 19th century. This was a turbulent time in Japan. The island nation was being swept up in cultural, political, and social upheaval. Finding a compass for the future became difficult in many aspects of life.

In painting, artists were confronted with new techniques, new motifs, and entirely new perspectives, which required immense intellectual effort to grapple with. Japan, after all, could already look back on a rich, thousand-year history of art and had to find a way to create contemporary works without betraying its own heritage.

Ink wash painting, a significant five-hundred-year-old legacy, was something that had never existed in Europe in this form. Gahō, in particular, grappled with this problem. Simply painting “as in the past” was certainly not the way forward, but how could one draw on the treasure of one’s own history and still create something “modern”?

In this veduta, Gahō begins with the classic seascape—a bay in the distance and a peninsula in the foreground. In principle, there is nothing revolutionary about this. Yet if one looks closely at how the bay is painted, one senses that this is not how artists painted from the 15th through the early 19th century. For the bay, Gahō chooses a very wet, broad brush, whose brushstroke texture reveals subtle vibrations from the painter’s hand (from the perspective of tradition, this is “impossible”). On the left, at the beginning—where the brush still holds the most water—he immediately painted pine trees using the “bay stroke,” which, due to the moisture, blur on the paper and create the illusion of a haze. (This tarashikomi technique originates from the Rinpa school—not the ink-wash painting tradition.) The pine trees at the front of the peninsula then appear perfectly distinct by contrast—even though they are nothing more than skillfully arranged dots.

The two ships off the peninsula are also just three horizontal lines with a few dots on them. Further down, however, another ship is moving—larger, more realistic—and here a stooped boatswain is clearly rowing. All these details bring atmosphere and a sense of depth to the painting, which radiate into a vast “emptiness of the sky.”

The painting is opulently mounted on precious gold silk, likely by Gahō’s student and great admirer, the highly respected painter Kawai Gyokudō, who also created, signed, and sealed the box.