The Ivy Way through Mount Utsu (Utsuyama)

The courtier at top left of this screen brushes a poem onto paper while the monk at center, his back to the viewer, waits to carry the missive. The two men are traveling through the same famously melancholic mountain pass in opposite directions: the courtier is traveling eastward, away from Kyoto, in disgrace, and the monk is returning to the capital. The story of their convergence is told in the 10th-century literary classic Tales of Ise. Ironically painted in eastern Edo, this screen is in fact a creative re-iteration of a painting by Hōitsu’s adopted master, Kyoto-born Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716). Kōrin’s version was published in the book One Hundred Paintings by Kōrin (displayed nearby), which Hōitsu compiled for the centennial of Kōrin’s death. This screen may have been painted for the same event.