Visiting a Friend on a Wooded Cliff

In this steep landscape, a scholar and his young attendant make their way up a pathway toward a retreat where another scholar gazes into the distance. The painting is executed with quick brush strokes accented by dots and lines in black ink. The artist, Ike Taiga, who became a leading proponent of the Nanga school, which specialized in painting Chinese subjects, first learned his distinctive style by studying woodblock-printed manuals on Chinese painting techniques. Many of his landscapes, like this one, were expressions of an idealized way of life rather than portrayals of actual places. Here the inscription quotes a line from a Chinese poem with a slight variation through the substitution of one character: "Mountain ranges of great age; a thousand tiers of trees."