Landscape with Yueyang Pavilion

This screen depicts a lake in China, which is overlooked by a famous pavilion. It was painted by a student of Taiga, the master artist who did the twelve paintings pasted on the screens to your left. As is common among Japanese "literati" painters of the day, the painter of these screens had never been to China to see this scenery in person. Instead, he was inspired by copies of earlier Chinese paintings in Japan.

Further information:
This two-panel screen depicts Yueyang Pavilion, a site famous in China for its literary associations. The pavilion overlooks Lake Dongting, depicted here with distinctive repeating waves, beyond which lie mountains and the Yangzi River. Lake Dongting is China's second-largest freshwater lake and acts as a flood basin for the Yangtze River, causing the lake's appearance to change seasonally and occasionally even daily. A Song dynasty scholar named Fan Zhongyan once marveled at the way Lake Dongting enhanced the view from the tower, claiming the rippling water "seems to expand boundlessly."

The artist Aoki Shukuya was a student of Ike Taiga (whose screens are shown to your right) and successor to his teacher's Taigado studio. He painted this work—a rare example by Shukuya in the screen format—in the last year of his life. Like most Japanese literati painters, this artist never saw Yueyang Pavilion in person. Shukuya's visual inspirations for this work probably came from an imported Chinese album leaf depicting this same scene and Japanese copies of this album by his teacher Taiga. Taiga's other work depicting the Yueyang Pavilion—a gold folding screen—is now a National Treasure of Japan.