Artworks

Plum Blossoms

Artwork · Gion Nankai · 1740s · kakemono

A monochrome plum by Gion Nankai (1677–1751), a doctor’s son with a Confucian education at the shogunal academy, exiled for ten years for an unrecorded offence: vigorous branches in the “flying-white” technique, where the split brush leaves a ragged swath of ink with the paper showing through, and small, delicately drawn petals. The plum is one of the Four Gentlemen of literati painting. 1 Mason 2005, pp. 327–328, fig. 381. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.