Japanese artist Higashiyama Kaii is best known for his dreamlike, contemplative landscape paintings. While at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in the 1920s, he studied Nihonga, a modern style of painting which followed traditional Japanese artistic conventions and techniques. The visions of the natural world to which he applied this style came from his extensive travels, not only into remote parts of Japan but also around Scandinavia and Europe more widely. 

Having grown up in the bustling cities of Yokohama and Kobe, Higashiyama explained that he first experienced ‘the awesomeness of nature’ quite late in life. He recalls feeling inspired by a ‘quiet mountain view in the moonlight’, a scene akin to the one depicted here. 

In this near-monochrome painting, Higashiyama builds up different tones of blue paint to represent a vast forested mountain range. This is a feature typical of Nihonga, where natural pigments produce a variety of subtly modulated tints when applied to washi (traditional Japanese paper). With green and lilac highlights, Higashiyama picks out the silhouettes of trees in the foreground, which descend into the shadowy depths of a valley. He suggests the recession of distant peaks by using progressively lighter blues (a technique known as ‘aerial perspective’). The prioritisation of form over line gives a diffuse, misty feeling to the landscape, and the pale glowing sky suggests a moment of dawn or dusk. Higashiyama did not include human figures in his paintings so there is no sense of relative proportion, allowing the viewer to wonder at nature’s sublime, incalculable greatness.

The near-spiritual serenity of his artwork provided a welcome escape in the post-war era. Higashiyama found great success nationally and, to some extent, internationally: in 1985 he collaborated with Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys in the so-called ‘Global-Art-Fusion’ project. The Emperor of Japan himself was a keen patron, and in 1968 he commissioned Higashiyama to produce an enormous mural depicting Tide at Daybreak for the Tokyo Imperial Palace.