Newsletter: Winter 2000
Taiga was a self-taught artisan who began his career in a fan shop, yet by his death had become one of the most celebrated painters and calligraphers of his day. A large number of his works from the 1740s to the 1770s survive, and Scholars Conversing in the Mountains represents his mature style. Conversant in Chinese literati painting, Taiga sought to style himself as a cultivated man in the Chinese manner, practicing poetry, tea, painting, and anti quarianism. An eccentric in his behavior, he emphasized in his art individual expression through calligraphic brush lines and ink washes. In the painting four men sit in a mountain clearing under an overhanging pine branch. A fifth figure with an attendant ascends through a cleft in the boulders to the left. The expressive ink lines in this nearly monochromatic painting describe the heavy contours of the tree trunks and mountain forms, while pale pink and blue washes suffuse the landscape scene.
