Artworks

Eastern Clouds, Sifted Snow

Artwork · Uragami Gyokudō · c. 1811 · kakemono

The full force of Uragami Gyokudō’s mature style, painted, says its inscription, after he had been drinking saké: the familiar literati motifs — a scholar reading in his cottage, a bridge, a village, a pagoda — dissolved in a dense atmosphere of layered ink, from a light underlying sketch to near-black accents, as if seen through falling snow. A cold, hostile world in which only the scholar, unaware, survives. 1 Mason 2005, p. 338, fig. 394. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.