Tanomura Chokunyū (1814–1907) 
Landscape in the Style of Wang Meng 
Japan, c. 1850 
Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk 
Purchase, 2005 (13204.1)

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A stream meanders through the lower register of this complex painting, fed by waterfalls higher up the mountain. On a bridge over the stream, a scholar stands with his attendant, who holds a chin zither. The viewer’s eye is drawn to a Buddhist temple in the midground, from which a path leads to a pavilion to admire the waterfalls, and then upward to a hermitage deep within the mountain. The painting is rich in aural suggestions, from the music of the chin to the waterfalls, to the wind blowing through the dense pine trees. The pines, symbols of longevity, and the temple add a spiritual significance to the landscape. 
 
Chokunyū was already a well-established artist before the opening of Japan and the dramatic changes of the Meiji period. He spent much of the middle of his career experimenting widely with various Chinese styles, based on whatever source materials he could access in Japan. The Chinese artist Wang Meng (c. 1308–1385) was an important early prototype of the literati tradition. However, there were no authentic paintings by Wang Meng in Japan, and this painting is rather an imaginative reconstruction of an idealized Wang Meng style based on much later, indirect Chinese models (which in turn were not based on originals either). The Wang Meng style as it was understood by later artists was defined by intricate brushwork and dense, even oppressive, mountains that fill the entire composition with little sense of empty space, which Chokunyū uses to great effect here to express his own aesthetic.