Innocence

The child, with plump cheeks, stands wearing a kimono too large for the body and straw sandals. The expression is relaxed, with a look that gives no sign of what the child is thinking. Behind, a slender branch stretches upward, and small wildflowers bloom at the child's feet.

The background is hardly painted, and the child is placed as if floating in an expanse of pale color. The kimono is expressed through ink and the bleeding of pale colors, and form is made not only by outlines but by gradations of color. The title, Muga, refers to a state of mind free of attachment to the self.

This work dates from 1897, when Yokoyama Taikan was twenty-nine by East Asian reckoning. He tried to express the state of enlightenment in the figure of a child that recalls a Buddha at birth (an image of the newborn Shakyamuni). The young Taikan's fresh idea shows in his rendering of the abstract subject of Buddhist teaching through the familiar figure of a child.

In the following year, 1898, Taikan took part in founding the Japan Art Institute under Okakura Tenshin. This work, which conveys the period just before, when he was searching for a new Japanese painting, is housed in the Taikan collection of the Adachi Museum of Art.