Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

Kaibi has created a sinuous landscape within which a hermitage is ensconced. The busy setting is made up of wavy lines to create the impres¬sion that the hills and mountains are flowing in constant movement. This impression of agitation is reinforced by the short texture strokes used throughout. Several trees reach up underneath the peak of the mountain forming a dramatic focal point to the complex scene.

Mountain Valley is indebted to the painting style of I Fukyū, a Chinese artist who spent time in Nagasaki. [Mount Tiantai of 1742 by Fukyū shows the same kind of dense, fantastic, ever-moving landscape. This is published in Stephen Addiss, ed., Japanese Quest for a New Vision: The Impact of Visiting Chinese Painters, 1600-1900: Selections from the Hutchinson Collection at the Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1986), 21]. Kaibi was known to be a great collector of Ming and Qing period Chinese paintings, so he could have owned one of the Chinese painter's works or been versed in his style through one of his teachers.

Tanaka Kaibi was a sake merchant born in Osaka but is recorded as having studied under prominent Nanga artists in Kyoto such as Tanomura Chikuden (1777-1835) and Noro Kaiseki (1747-1828). There he became part of a circle of literati that included the proprietor of the Kyūkyodō stationery and art supply shop, as evidenced by this fan. According to the artist’s signature, this image was painted for the head of Kyūkyodō in Kyoto, most likely Kumagai Naoyasu, in the year of his death.