Fuyu no keikan (Ravine in winter)

The son of a Kyoto dyer, he started to study painting under Kishi Chikudo (1826-1897) at the age of twelve, entering the atelier of the great Takeuchi Seiho (1864-1942) after Chikudo's death. He won a prize at the first Bunten exhibition in 1907 and from 1909 started teaching at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts as well as in his own private painting school. From 1914 he began to suffer from a debilitating illness which restricted his output for a decade but by 1924 he had recovered sufficiently to accept another teaching position in Kyoto.
This painting was one of two works by Goun shown at the major exhibition of contemporary Japanese art organised by the French and Japanese governments in 1929, and is reproduced in the commemorative catalogue published in Tokyo later in the same year.