Thunder

The twentieth-century Nihonga artist Horii Kōha draws on the conventions of the late Heian period (794–1185), the age of The Tale of Genji, to portray a scene of two court ladies reacting to the crashing sound of thunder. One woman standing and the other crouching in terror on the floor both have their eyes tightly shut and cover their ears with their hands. They both wear translucent white court robes over pale red hakama trousers. Long flowing hair, blackened teeth, and eyebrows repainted high on the forehead were cosmetic customs of ancient times. The seductive power of the painting derives in no small part from the use of stylized rounded shapes of the wide sleeves and the fluid tendrils of the long black tresses. The famous painting demonstrates how Nihonga artists of the modern age often drew on imagery of an idealized courtly past to conjure up feeling of nostalgia and poetic suggestiveness. The composition in fact calls to mind a pivotal episode of The Tale of Genji, in the “Branch of Sacred Evergreen” (Sasaki) chapter, in which Genji sneaks in for a tryst with his mistress Oborozukiyo, a high-ranking handmaid to the emperor, “when at night, just before dawn, rain suddenly came pelting down and thunder roared” (Royal Tyler, trans., p. 217).

This is one of Koha’s earliest known works, painted and exhibited at the Bunten Exhibition of 1917 when he was only twenty years old. Born in Kyoto in 1897 with the family name of Horii Seitarō, he graduated from the Painting Division of the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1915, then entered the Kyoto Municipal Painting Specialty School to study under Kikuchi Keigetsu (1879–1955), graduating in 1918. Even before his graduation, his work was chosen for Bunten exhibits in 1915 and 1917 (with this work), and he exhibited regularly at the Teiten shows of the 1920s and 1930s. He specialized in paintings of women, at first, as here, drawing on Japanese history or classical literature for inspiration, then later expanding his repertoire to include portrayals of courtesans and finally modern women.