Landscape with River View

This painting, with its clusters of pine needles and profuse twigs on leafless trees, exhibits Ike Taiga’s penchant for decoratively patterned brushwork. Typical of his playfully eccentric compositions are the impossibly tall pines and curiously bulging foreground rocks. Taiga became a professional painter at the age of fifteen when he opened a fan shop in Kyoto in order to support his widowed mother. He studied imported woodblock books featuring Chinese literati-style painting, but he also sought out other artists—including émigré Chinese monks—for painting instruction. Taiga’s artistic brilliance lay in his ability to free himself from the narrow confines of the Chinese scholar painting tradition, although it served as his fundamental inspiration.