River Landscape

The eighteenth-century painter Soga Shōhaku developed a distinctive style that led to his being labeled an eccentric. Whereas other artists sought to join well-known schools of painting, Shōhaku named as his mentor a monk who was also a painter, Soga Jasoku (a.k.a. Dasoku), who had been dead for three hundred years. Like his distant adopted predecessor, Shōhaku drew on Song-dynasty Chinese landscape painting styles, as seen in this painting with its asymmetrical composition and large areas of empty space. Although this example is relatively conservative in style, some of the artist’s eccentricities can be discerned in his treatment of the rocky overhang at the center and in the strong contrasts of dark and light ink.