Hirai Baisen 平井楳仙 (1899 –1969)
Kyoto in the Winter
Item number: T-3219LSize: H 67.1" x W 148.6" (170.5 x 377.5 cm)
Age: 1920s
Pair of six-panel folding screens
Colors, ink, and gofun on paper
(Left screen) signature: Baisen 楳仙.
Seal: Baisen 楳仙
(Right screen) seal: Baisen 楳仙.
This pair of screens offers a spectacular view of Eastern Kyoto in the winter. The artist has taken the two best-known sites of the eastern part of the city, Kiyomizu Temple and Yasaka Pagoda, and placed them into his new, highly original vision of Kyoto. We see the two famous sights and also the shop-lined streets that join them, such as the Ninenzaka, Chawanzaka, the Sannenzaka; in addition, the roofs of Jojuin Temple can be seen, just to the left of Kiyomizu Temple. All store roofs are covered with snow and the streets appear on the screens as if they were the backbones of large, white creatures. In the snow we can also distinguish the rows of cherry trees, now in the depths of winter. And overall we see the falling of fresh snow, in the form of drops of gofun, finely ground seashell powder, against a dark sky painted with ink wash. When looked at from a low perspective, as they were intended to be seen, the screen pair reminds one of looking out of a window in the early morning with awe after a silent all-night snowfall has magically transformed the landscape outside. One can sense the weight of the heavy, snow-laden gray clouds above and the silence of the snow-covered mountain below them.
Without the iconic image of Yasaka Pagoda on the left screen it would be very difficult to place this view—one would almost be tempted to place it in Yoshino or other parts of Japan. The placement of the pagoda works as a memory marker: the rest of the image is then placed into order, in context of the site we recognize from our visual memory. The screens work on overturning expectations: we expect to see Kiyomizu with the lattice-like scaffolding of the Main Hall; we also expect to see the many cherry trees of the area in full bloom—he artist now shows a tantalizing glimpse of one and the snow-laden branches of the other. We also expect to see colorful streets, plants, flowers, and architecture, but instead see a view composed almost entirely from the monotones of ink wash. Also, instead of the densely-built, tourist-infested tourist sites that we are familiar with, we are now given a poetic reworking of reality: here is a refined view of Japan’s architectural past set within new contexts—the sites as they interact with the elements of nature.
An intellectual painter, Hirai Baisen (1899 –1969) was at the cutting edge of the twentieth-century Nihonga movements during his early years.1 He was highly interested in the histories of institutions, especially those of temples, as can be seen from his many works on these themes.2 He was also keenly aware of Japanese art history, a fact that comes across clearly in this screen, with its evocative ech-oes of past masterpieces, such as the handscroll by Yosa Buson (1716 – 83), Snowclad Houses in the Night (Yashiki rōdaizu 夜色楼台図, Miho Museum)3. We see here the same rooftops, the rolling hills in snowy white, the gofun spattered snow, and the mottled ink wash sky as in the Buson masterpiece. The painter also refers back to the many screens of the famous sites of Kyoto, the Rakuchū rakugaizu screens, with their sites separated from each other by gold clouds, here replaced by banks of snow.4 The screens are a testament to the genius of Baisen as he revisits the iconic masterpieces of the past and then successfully reworks them into a new vocabulary of his own.
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