Maruyama Ōkyo, Geese Over a Beach

[music]

0:00:06.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the National Museum of Asian Art looking at a four panel screen.

0:00:11.9 Dr. Frank Feltens: We are looking at a painting by the 18th-century painter Maruyama Ōkyo. And Ōkyo is a famous painter in Japanese art history for a number of reasons, but one is the way that he established realism or naturalism in Japanese art and really made it a part of Japanese art history moving forward.

0:00:30.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s such an unexpected and beautiful painting. We’re confronted with these four broad panels of what at first seemed to be just simple background, just almost plain white. And in fact, this would have been whiter when it was first created. And then, of course, we see these two birds to the right. Only then does my eye begin to pick out the subtly painted seashore.

0:00:54.1 Dr. Frank Feltens: The painting is very atmospheric. There are two geese just taking off. As they are flying into this emptiness that Ōkyo presents us with. You hear the sound of their feathers, of their wings in the still morning air. It is cold, it is crisp. You feel the chill on your skin.

0:01:11.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: I feel like I’ve seen these geese. They seem so exacting. And both of them have their heads slightly down.

0:01:19.8 Dr. Frank Feltens: They look heavy. They show you how gravity is pulling a bird’s or anybody back to the earth and how they are trying to fight this pull downward as they are taking off. They are supposed to be a male and a female, and it’s hard to differentiate their gender based on the way that Ōkyo painted them. But this is a moment of togetherness between these two. Ōkyo chose to paint them without outlines. Except for the beaks, they are the only places in the entire painting that are outlined. The rest of the plumage is done in what is called boneless style, which almost makes the birds fuse with their background.

0:01:53.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: But if you look really closely, you see that the artist has brilliantly used the negative space, even within the contour of the bird, to accentuate elements, that is the dark feathers at the edge of the wings are just so many brushstrokes.

0:02:08.2 Dr. Frank Feltens: The painting is one of emptiness and of negative space of reduction, rather than giving you information. So you are meant to fill in the different gaps.

0:02:18.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: And yet, despite that, the artist has created planes in space, volumes in space. We understand the anatomy of these birds in three dimensions, even though they are these singular brushstrokes. And you really get a sense of that early morning quiet with just the sound of the small waves that are breaking.

0:02:37.8 Dr. Frank Feltens: Ōkyo makes you sit right in the middle of the sandy shore. And I grew up by the sea, so I know exactly what the ocean looks like. And it looks like this. The geese, just by their presence, you know that it is autumn, it is chilly.

0:02:51.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And geese are a symbol that occur with some frequency, especially in Japanese poetry, as symbols of the coming of the autumn.

0:03:00.0 Dr. Frank Feltens: They are symbols of the arriving fall, that the seasons are changing, that the days are getting shorter, colder. But in this case, this is not the early fall, I would say, this is really like deep into the colder season. This is supposed to evoke some kind of chilly effect in the morning, possibly to remedy the humid air of the Kyoto summer.

0:03:21.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: There is a sense of melancholy because of the openness and emptiness of the painting as a whole.

0:03:26.8 Dr. Frank Feltens: Ōkyo was a master of capturing likenesses, but also tinkering with your feelings. This work definitely is very melancholy. You hear the birds crying at you. It enhances your feeling of solitude. Even though they are not alone, they are flying together. So that gives you a little bit to hold onto. But imagine having something like this in your home, being surrounded by this misty sea, and then having these two birds in the middle of it. That is not a really uplifting way to fit your living room.

0:03:57.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re not looking at this the way that it was originally intended to be seen.

0:04:01.9 Dr. Frank Feltens: This work was originally configured as sliding doors. Probably there would have been three more sets for each wall in the room. You would have been sitting in the middle of a room decorated only with images of the sea, with only one side having these two geese to add life to a landscape that would otherwise just be the ocean. Ever since I started at this museum, I’ve looked at these screens and tried to figure out what their context might have been. I found a pair of sliding doors in Japan in a private collection, and they are so close that I’m pretty much certain that our painting was originally part of this set.

0:04:39.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: One can only imagine how powerful that image would have been to have surrounded you in this original domestic space.

0:04:45.5 Dr. Frank Feltens: I agree. It must have been amazing, because everything you would have seen is the ripple of the sea, and you couldn’t have escaped the sensation of hearing the ocean literally filling the room.

0:04:55.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: And we think that this was probably painted in 1780s. And if that’s true, the artist was painting in his full maturity. And he had developed an extraordinary reputation. He had become quite popular, especially when it comes to the merchant class, and he had developed a large school of followers.

0:05:11.9 Dr. Frank Feltens: He really became one of the 18th century’s most important painters for the very reason that he was the first to move into real naturalism. Up until the point that he made it part of the mainstream, it was really more of a curiosity. It was thought of as something that was not Japanese. It came in through Dutch and Chinese paintings and optical devices that sort of created a sense of three dimensionality and such. But Ōkyo took it and turned it into a staple of Japanese art history, and I think that is a tremendous achievement.

0:05:45.0 Dr. Frank Feltens: But it also set him apart from this competition that was happening in Kyoto. Almost every other house, you could almost say, had a painting atelier in it. Ōkyo lived in a neighborhood with lots of different famous artists. So there was fierce competition, and every painter, in order to succeed, had to craft a very distinctive style. And in this kind of competition, Ōkyo chose this particular naturalism for himself and became so influential and so popular that he created a school and a lineage that continued into modernity.

[music]

This work at the National Museum of Asian Art

Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art

Michael R. Cunningham, “Byōbu: The Art of the Japanese Screen,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, volume 71, number 7 (September 1984), pp. 223–32.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Okyo and the Maruyama-Shijo School of Japanese Painting, exhibition catalogue (Saint Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum, 1980).

Edo period, an introduction

Read a Reframing Art History chapter, The four seasons in the arts of Japan