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Yokoyama Taikan — Floating Lights (Ryūtō), c. 1909

Ryūtō (流燈, Floating Lights), c. 1909, by Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958). Hanging scroll; mineral pigments on silk. Taikan Memorial Museum, Tokyo. A nighttime Buddhist festival scene depicting floating lanterns on a river, executed in Taikan's morōtai (hazy, outline-free) technique — the defining style of mature Nihonga painting.

Scholarly Significance

Anchor Yokoyama Taikan's mature Nihonga style with Floating Lights — the paradigmatic example of his morōtai (no-outline) technique applied to the Buddhist night landscape.

Notes

  • ·The floating lantern festival (tōrō nagashi) is a Buddhist Obon ceremony where paper lanterns are set on rivers to guide spirits of the dead.
  • ·Taikan's morōtai technique — developed with Shimomura Kanzan and Okakura Kakuzo — deliberately abandons the traditional Japanese outline (mokkotsu technique) in favour of tonal gradation inspired by Western watercolour and ink wash.
  • ·The technique was initially mocked as 'Taikan fog' by conservative critics but became the defining modern Nihonga style.
  • ·The night setting allows Taikan to explore the atmospheric properties of mineral pigments on silk without linear definition.
  • ·The work belongs to a sequence of Buddhist seasonal subjects Taikan painted throughout the Meiji and Taisho periods.