[Designated Cultural Property of Yamagata Prefecture]
Late-Edo Period (19C)
Okada Hankō (1782-1846) was a painter of the literary school and mainly active in Osaka. He was the son of Okada Beisanjin, a famed literati painter himself. Hankō’s delicate and clear painting style and his ability to depict details won him considerable acclaim in his time.
Beiho Sansui is a style of ink painting said to have been started by Mi Fu, a literary scholar-artist of the Song dynasty, then adopted and further developed by his son Mi Youren. With its roots in the splashed ink approach to art of the Tang Dynasty, the term in English roughly translates as ‘ink pointillism’, or ‘rice-dot shading.’ This method involves forming the general shapes of mountains or tree trunks by blurring ink without contour lines, then overlaying ink dots.
This is a rice-dotted landscape painting, depicting mountains with horizontal dots of ink, which also encompasses a ‘vanishing point’ technique, in which peaks are piled upward to fill a vertical screen. The work is lean, tight, and impactful – the well-rounded brush strokes and subtle gradation are particularly impressive and the rainy atmosphere even gives the viewer a sense of being there. A masterpiece created in his twilight years, the work is testament to Hankō’s consummate skill and artistry.