Former Jimon in Temple Screen Painting (painted by Hōjō

A Dying Painter's Rooms on the Slopes of Tōnomine

In the spring of 1751, a painter already in his mid-fifties put his signature and a date to a set of paintings made for a quiet residence on the wooded ridge of Tōnomine, south of Nara. His name was Sakaki Hyakusen. Within a year and a half he was dead. The forty-one painted panels he left, set into the sliding doors and fixed walls of four adjoining rooms, survive today as an Important Cultural Property. The official designation gives them a long and exact name: the Former Jimon-in Wall Paintings, by the brush of Sakaki Hyakusen, bearing a dated inscription of the fourth month of Hōreki 1.

The rooms once belonged to Jimon-in, a small Buddhist sub-cloister attached to Myōraku-ji, the temple complex that stood where Tanzan Shrine stands now. When the government forced the separation of Buddhist and Shinto institutions in the early Meiji period, the cloister passed into the hands of the Suehara family, hereditary priests of the shrine, and became their home. The wooden shoin interior, the formal reception space of a high-status residence, came through that change largely intact. Hyakusen's paintings stayed with it.

What he painted there was landscape. These are not the gilded, theatrical screens of the great castle and temple commissions of the previous century. They are ink and light washes of colour on paper, the restrained idiom that Japanese painters of Hyakusen's generation were borrowing from the literati tradition of China. Mountains recede into mist, water opens out below, a few figures move through the scenery at a human scale. A set of the panels is recorded simply as landscapes in light colour on paper.

Why These Paintings Matter

Hyakusen belongs to the first generation of Japanese Nanga, the school of literati painting also called bunjinga. The name points to its source: the Southern school of Chinese painting, an amateur, scholar's tradition that prized brushwork, suggestion and personal expression over polish and display. Hyakusen is often described as the first painter in Japan to work convincingly in that authentic Chinese landscape manner. He worked alongside Gion Nankai and Yanagisawa Kien, and the three are usually named together as the pioneers who opened the way.

He came to it by an unusual road. Born in Nagoya in 1697, the son of a medicine dealer, he was a townsman rather than a samurai or a scholar-official, and he made his living selling his work, a fact he stated plainly about himself. Where men like Kien approached Chinese painting through classical learning and theoretical treatises, Hyakusen learned more directly, copying from imported Chinese paintings and the woodblock painting manuals that circulated among enthusiasts. He had also trained his eye as a haiku poet, studying under a master of the Bashō lineage before he settled into painting. That mixed formation gave his work a wide range and, by some accounts, an uneven quality from piece to piece.

One thing he could do that many later literati painters found difficult was fill a large surface. Sliding doors and folding screens demand a sense of architectural scale that the intimate album leaf does not. Hyakusen handled them with confidence, and the Jimon-in rooms are a sustained example of it. The national commentary on the designation singles out the coherence of his compositions and his unusually strong use of light and shade, calling the manner distinctly his own and placing the work as a marker of one direction early Nanga was taking.

The paintings carry their own date, which is part of why they are valued. A dated, signed work fixes a point in an artist's development, and Hyakusen left relatively few of them. This one comes from the very end of his life, his fifty-fifth year by the traditional count. The designation records the inscription as the fourth month of 1751; the national commentary describes the set as a work of the third month of the same year. Either way, it stands among the last things he made.

What to Look For

Because the paintings cover four connected rooms, they were meant to be read as a moving sequence, not as single framed pictures. A guest seated in the reception space would have had landscape on more than one wall at once, the scenery turning corners and continuing across the room dividers. Looking at the panels with that in mind changes them. The eye is invited to travel.

Watch the handling of depth. Hyakusen builds distance with graded ink, near forms dark and firm, far ones dissolving toward the paper, and he reinforces it with the shading the commentary praises, so that rock faces and slopes seem to catch and lose the light. This modelling, closer to a sense of volume than most Japanese ink painting of the time attempted, is one of the things that marks the work as early and experimental rather than settled into a later convention.

Look too at the economy of colour. The palette is deliberately thin, a few earth tones and a wash of blue or green over the ink, leaving large areas of bare paper to read as water, sky or haze. This is the literati taste at work: less is meant to suggest more, and the unpainted ground does real labour in the composition.

Visiting the Setting

The panels themselves are no longer in the rooms they were made for. They are on deposit at the Nara National Museum, which holds them for safekeeping, and they are not on permanent public view. They surface from time to time in the museum's special exhibitions, so anyone hoping to see the originals should check the current programme before travelling. The former Jimon-in residence is a private home and is not generally open.

The place to go is Tanzan Shrine itself, in the Tōnomine hills of Sakurai, about an hour by road and rail south of central Nara. The shrine honours Fujiwara no Kamatari and marks the spot where, by tradition, he and Prince Naka no Ōe planned the reforms that reshaped the early Japanese state. Its grounds climb the hillside in a series of vermilion buildings, crowned by a thirteen-storey wooden pagoda that has no equal anywhere else. The maples here are famous, and the shrine is busiest and most striking in late autumn when the slopes turn red. Spring cherry and early-summer green draw smaller crowds and reward a slower visit.

Several of the former cloister's other buildings, the residence hall, the kitchen wing, a small worship hall and the gates, are listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties, so the architectural setting that once held the paintings has its own protected standing even though the panels have moved. Visiting Tanzan Shrine, then walking through the surrounding precinct, gives a clear sense of the world the Suehara family lived in and the kind of room Hyakusen was painting for.