High Mountains, Flowing Water: Yu Boya and Zhong Ziqi

Okura Ryūzan

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This combination of landscape and figures, with a clearly Chinese theme, contains a vertical arrangement of narrow, block-like mountain forms and a grove of trees, bamboo, and banana plants. Within the grove sit two gentlemen, one of whom rests on an ornamental rock as he plays the qin (a zitherlike stringed instrument). The two are accompanied by a servant boy, who fans the fire in a small stove upon which tea is being prepared. The landscape elements were executed in the bluish green palette meant to evoke ancient Chinese landscape paintings. Ōkura Ryūzan, the son of a Yamato peasant, came to move in the same literary circles as the influential philosopher and poet Rai San'yō (1780–1832) and several prominent Nanga school artists, including Nakabayashi Chikutō (1776–1853). Both Ryūzan and his wife, Shūran, were students of Chikutō, and Ryūzan’s landscape paintings display a delicacy of color and brushwork reminiscent of his teacher’s.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art