036B

  • Landscape with Waterfall and Figure on a Bridge

  • 18th-19th century
  • Artist unknown (Japanese)
  • Ink drawing on scroll
  • 110.7 x 38.9 cm., 43-1/4 x 15-1/4" image scroll
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase in Honor of Cyrus and Mildred Churchill, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College 2007.23.b

Essay by Naoko Gunji, Former Assistant Professor of Art History

This pair of hanging scrolls of landscape paintings depicts a so-called monumental landscape, a style that originated in Song China (960-1279). The style typically portrays a grand-scale mountain with subordinate, small-scale streams, rocks, trees on slopes and paths for travelers, representing not an actual view of nature but a conceptual vision of the macrocosmic universe. In Japan, where it was executed almost exclusively with monochrome ink, its popularity grew in the Muromachi period (1333-1573) and onwards.

The scrolls at Augustana depict tiny architectural structures—from the foreground, a bridge, pathways, buildings that may be a restaurant and a pavilion, and a Buddhist temple sanctuary—against dominant mountains in the background. From the cliffs of the mountains, two waterfalls flow down to a river. Trees are shaped with strong brushstrokes as if projecting from the surface of the paintings. Travelers in the foreground are taking pilgrimages to the temple.

It is unknown how Augustana's landscape paintings were used, but they may have served as part of an architectural setting in which a viewer could identify him/herself with depicted pilgrims and undergo a spiritual journey to the sacred temple, by shifting his/her perspective from the bottom corner, where a traveler and his attendant are crossing over the bridge, to the top, where the temple stands at the peak of the sacred mountain.

Landscape is one of the most significant and enduring subjects in the East Asian tradition, and embodies a spiritual essence of the universe. The term san/sui, the Japanese equivalent of the western "landscape," is composed of two characters for mountain and water-two opposite elements, mountain for yang and water for yin-thereby epitomizing a perfect balance of the entire universe. By uniting him/herself with the depicted vast universe as if he/she were traveling in the mountain, the viewer could purify and nourish his/her mind and spirit, in the same way a pilgrim could through ascetic religious practices in a sacred mountain.