Village Under Moonlight

月夜水村図屏風

The long horizontal format of this work contains a scene with a farm in a village along a river, which flows from the distance and spreads to fill the entire foreground. A small wooden bridge spans the stream, making it accessible to the farmhouses. The scene seems to be a misty spring evening.

Perhaps the greatest landscape artist of Kyoto in the 1700s, Okyo produced many powerful scenes of waves, waterfalls, and mysterious foggy mountains. In this intimate landscape, he expressed another aspect of his artistic aspirations: to depict nature in an intimate way that focuses on the everyday life of ordinary people. The painting is signed in the lower right with an inscription indicating that Okyo painted this work in the spring of 1787.