Blooming Plum Trees and Birds, ca 1915

Shirayama Shunpō
Blooming Plum Trees and Birds, ca 1915
Pair of two-panel folding screens; mineral colors, ink, and shell powder on paper
Size each screen 70¼ x 71½ in. (178.2 x 182 cm)
T-4712

Signed and sealed at lower right of the right-hand screen Shunpō; sealed at top left of the left-hand screen Shunpō Sen

Treating a pair of two-panel screens as a single pictorial space, Shirayama Shunpō depicts the upper part of a large, ancient white plum tree sporting a profusion of blossoms in early spring. The composition is structured by five trunks that spread out from below like the sticks of a Japanese folding fan, allowing the viewer to imagine the size of the entire tree, while a sense of depth is conveyed by the fainter colors of some elements, especially a prodigiously long, slender branch that stretches from right to left in the background across all four leaves of the screen pair. On the leftmost leaf a pair of uso (Eurasian bullfinches), a brilliantly colored male and more subdued female, perch side by side on a slender stem, while on the right-hand screen a solitary male perhaps awaits a mate. Green shoots of new growth sprout from several branches, and at far right the withered brown remains of a vine—a reminder of earlier seasons—still cling to the tree, while leaves of epiphytic ferns herald the coming of spring.

Through generous use of green mineral pigment applied to the trunks and branches using tarashikomi (wet-on-wet or puddling technique), the artist draws our attention to the tree’s gnarled antiquity; the same technique can be seen in depictions of plum trees by leaders of the Rinpa tradition such as Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716) or Sakai Hōitsu (1761–1829). The artist’s debt to the past is clear but in other respects his painting is a masterpiece typical of its era, confidently blending the semi-abstraction of Rinpa with the careful study of nature advocated by the eighteenth-century Shijō school, transformed by a Western sense of realism and approach to composition.

Shirayama Shunpō was born in Tokyo, the son of Shirayama Shōsai (1853–1923), the greatest lacquerer of the Meiji and Taisho eras, and received his early training in painting from Hashimoto Gahō (1835–1908), another artistic titan widely regarded as a founder of the neo-nativist Nihonga style. Moving to Osaka in 1912, Shirayama exhibited in 1915 a painting of tangled fall maple branches, in the same two-panel screen pair format as the present work, at the ninth Bunten National Exhibition. He returned to Tokyo the same year to work as a painter and, occasionally, a designer of book covers, remaining active until 1940. A selection of his paintings were included in an exhibition of lacquers by his father and his father’s pupils, held at the Kiyomizu Sannenzaka Museum, Kyoto, in summer 2011.