About This Album

An undated sketch album by Kubota Beisen (1852-1906) using sumi and watercolors and consisting of fourteen drawings.  Twelve of the drawings are landscapes (sansui ga), one is a drawing of a bird on a plum branch (kachō ga) and one a scene from the Japanese folktale Kachi-kachi Yama (Crackling Mountain), in which a hare smashes the boat of his rival, a tanuki (a mythical raccoon dog/badger.)

In describing Beisen's work, Henry P. Bowie, lawyer, artist, author and student of Beisen's states "Kubota was so skillful in sketching that while traveling rapidly through a country he could faithfully reproduce the salient features of an extended landscape, conformable to the general rule in sketching, that what first attracts the eye is to be painted first, all else becoming subordinate to it in the scheme."¹

The theme of this sketch book may become clear when the currently unread colophon is deciphered.

¹ On the Laws of Japanese Painting, Henry P. Bowie, Paul Elder and Company Publishers, 1911, p. 14.