Early Evening

This poetic rendition of figures in an evening landscape features a narrow range of ink tones and a skillful use of wash and soft, wet brushstrokes for a deliberately blurred effect. Trees and foliage rise up from the right and left sides of the painting, leaving an open glade between them, within which the figures, rendered almost abstractly in washy brushstrokes, appear; above, birds fly beneath a pale grey cloud cover. The overall impression is one of a quiet, gentle intimacy between man and nature.

Morita Tsunetomo’s work was influenced by travel and study in Europe as well as his interest in Nihonga, an approach to painting that combined traditional Japanese painting conventions with Western painting techniques. Having first studied oil painting at the Tokyo Art School (later the Tokyo University of the Art or Tōkyō Geijutsu Daigaku), he traveled in France, where he became interested in French modern art, particularly the work of Paul Cézanne. Returning to Japan, he became the director of the Western Painting Department of the Imperial Art Academy, wrote a number of essays and commentaries on art, and turned to the painting of landscapes, mostly in a Western-influenced style and some specifically in the style of Cézanne. In his later years, he created a number of works in the Nihonga mode, using the traditional Japanese media of ink and paper, and sometimes color. This painting, with its combination of Japanese and Western elements, appears to be a precursor to that development.