Heart Sutra and Landscape

Ike Taiga was a professional painter who employed the purposefully amateurish styles of hugely admired scholar-painters from Chinese antiquity. Taiga assimilated and modified Chinese painting modes like his predecessors had, but he also synthesized what he learned, experimenting with compositional formulas and brushwork to create new and viable styles that were uniquely Japanese. With Taiga, Japanese Nanga painting reached maturity during the third quarter of the 1700s. For this painting he used a relatively dry brush to paint a landscape in the lower right corner in a style related to that of the Chinese painter Ni Zan (1306–74). It shows a scholar and servants in a boat floating on a river between a foreground of rocky outcroppings and a grove of gangly trees and mountains in the distance. The rest of the scroll is filled with the three hundred Chinese characters that make up the entire text of the short Buddhist scripture commonly known as the Heart Sutra.