Page 268 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

reverently and lyrically, in the massive series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo by Ando Hiroshige
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(cats. 145 -154). It is not surprising that Hiroshige followed set tropes for depicting given famous
places — such as fireworks at the Ryógoku bridge (cat. 147) —because he had illustrated such guide-
books himself. In One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, his last great production, he breathed new life

into themes that had nearly been exhausted by repetition.
Not only did the city nurture its artists, provide them with subject matter, and furnish them
clientele, it served as a foil for the countryside. The city supplied the structure of culture for the
appreciation of nature. Nearly all of the painters represented in this book hailed from the great cities
of Kyoto or Edo; some, like Ike Taiga (1723 -1776), proudly included their native city in their signature.
Rural areas served as a lure precisely because artists could return to the sociability and economic sup- 267
port of city life. The Confucian notion of superior people refreshing their soul in nature and broaden-
ing their spirit with travel was an image affected by warrior and commoner alike. The environment
of the farm was celebrated in the Confucian rhetoric, which placed farmers second only to the scholar
class. But picturesque scenes glorifying agriculture (cats. 91, 92) belong to the ideology of the city.
No self-respecting Edo-period painter would have dreamed of trading places with the back-breaking
lot of the farmer.

" P U R E " At one end of the spectrum of landscapes are scenes so general that one cannot be certain whether
L A N D S C A P E the artist intended to portray Japan or China. Frozen Clouds, Sifted Snow by Uragami Gyokudó, Spring
Willows and Heron; Mynas in Autumn Foliage by Goshun, and Traveler and Horse Passing through a Spring
Landscape by Yosa Buson (cats. 156,157,170) belong to this category.
Gyokudó's painting offers one model of how a "pure" landscape might be read. A towering
Chinese-style "dragon vein" mountain under a lowering gray sky dominates the painting. Human pres-
ence is indicated only by a tiny figure in a hut dwarfed by the monumental mountains and formidable
ravines. Cold gray ink and the snow white of the paper convey the shivery effect of winter. Gyokudó's
abstract brushwork encompasses every imaginable mode of delivering ink to paper: it is heavily flung
or subtly daubed in scratchy or velvety strokes; in places (the trees at the top right) it even looks as if
it were burned into the page, like a sparkler. Touches of orange — hints of lingering autumn — serve to
make the atmosphere colder yet. Few images have so successfully captured the lonely harshness of a
frozen landscape. The Chinese cognoscenti, or bunjin (Chinese: wenren), whom Gyokudó was imitating
called such landscapes "mountains of the mind" or "heart prints."
These pure landscapes, however, are subject to the same systems of encoding that govern
all representation. They embody a longing for untrammeled and undiluted nature — part learned from
China, part in emulation of a long history of celebrated Japanese recluses, and part stimulated by the
tensions of living in a society governed by strict ideological protocols. The alienation visible in Gyokudó's
landscape reflects the social and personal alienation of the artist, who was not suited either to his times
or to his station as a samurai retainer for an important domain in Bizen. He resigned his position and
took up a life of cultivated wandering. Questions of subjectivity and self-fashioning are raised by Gyo-
kudó's self-transformation from bureaucrat to bunjin. To what degree does an individual have a say about
"who" he or she might be? Gyokudó deliberately traded the label "samurai" for the designation "wander-
ing literatus."The landscape bears witness to this, serving as a "focus for the formation of identity." 16