The exhibition, organized by Felice Fischer, the Philadelphia museum’s longtime curator of Japanese art, with Kyoko Kinoshita, assistant curator, includes many important loans from Japanese museums — among them several works designated as national treasures — and is accompanied by an excellent and hefty catalog. Taiga’s renown, along with the record-keeping traditions of Japan and the affectionate esteem in which he was held by his fellow artists and students, means that a lot is known about his life, travels, friendships and dealings.

Versed in Chinese painting and poetry of all periods, but especially that of the literati artists of the Ming and Qing dynasties; familiar with the reigning schools of official Japanese art; inculcated with Neo-Confucian thought and interested in Daoism and Buddhism, Taiga was exceptionally erudite but not an aesthete; his work often has a visceral directness. He infused his copies of Chinese landscape paintings with a sense of reality gained from ext