Early Spring Landscape

Below towering cliffs, a surging waterfall, and wizened pine trees sits a lonely riverside pavilion, its curtains drawn back. The occupant is nowhere to be found, but his boat is moored nearby. There is a bridge across the way, but the path it seems to connect to disappears in heavy mist.

The painter of this landscape, whose seal reading “Shūtoku” is impressed at lower left, was long confused with another painter of the same name who was a follower of the master painter Sesshū active in far western Japan. The Shūtoku of this painting, however, has recently been identified as a wholly separate painter active in the eastern provinces. The poetic inscriptions on this landscape are by successive abbots of the Kenchōji, eastern Japan’s oldest and most important Zen monastery.