Peach blossom idyll

How do you picture utopia? One of China’s most famous poets, Tao Yuanming (365–427), supplied a lasting vision in his tale “Peach Blossom Spring.” The legend tells of a fisherman who accidentally saiIs into a river Iined with blossoming peach trees. At the end of the river, he finds a narrow cave leading him into a utopian village, entirely isolated from the cares of the world. When the fisherman leaves, he is never able to find the village again. The artist alludes to this story through exquisite pink-hued trees and a grotto-like tunnel in the lower right. From this tunnel, a road leads the viewer past fanciful, tilting peaks to a tranquil setting of farmhouses and rice fields.

The artist of this otherworldly vision, Tokuyama Gyokuran, was a rare female artist working in a man’s world in eighteenth-century Japan. Famous in her own time as a poet and artist, she was married to the painter Ike Taiga. Like Taiga, Gyokuran’s works reflect the concerns of the literati movement, whose members emulated the lifestyles and ink-painting modes of Chinese scholar-artists.