Lit. "true view pictures." A type of landscape painting based on naturalistic depiction of a particular place. The term dates from the mid Edo period (18th century) when this type of landscape was developed by *nanga 南画 painters. The most famous is the Asamadake shinkei-zu 朝熊嶽真景図 (True View of Mt. Asama) by Ike no Taiga 池大雅 (1723-76). Taiga's friend Kuwayama Gyokushū 桑山玉洲 (1746-99) discusses the theory behind shinkei-zu in his Kaiji higen 絵事鄙言 (Humble Words on Painting). True view pictures also appear in Western-style painting *yōfūga 洋風画, and most notably in the work of Aōdō Denzen 亜欧堂田善 (1748-1822), as in, for example, the screens of the Asamayama shinkei-zu 浅間山真景図 (True View of Mt. Asama) in the Tokyo National Museum.
Although the term is Japanese, the idea of painting real places in a relatively life-like manner has a long history in Chinese painting, dating at least from the Song painter Li Song's (Jp: Ri Sū 李嵩, late 12th-early 13th century) depiction of the West Lake at Hangzhou *Seiko 西湖, and best seen in the work of the late Ming dynasty painter Zhang Hong (Jp: Chō Kō 張宏, 1577-1668?). In Japan, Sesshū's 雪舟 (1420-1506) descriptive paintings of Ama nohashidate-zu 天橋立図 and Tōfukuji 東福寺 (both in the Kyoto National Museum) are depictions of famous places *meisho-e 名所絵 that show many characteristics of what was later called shinkei-zu. Conversely, Edo artists sometimes called their landscapes shinkei-zu although the depictions can hardly be called naturalistic renderings of recognizable spots. The term shinkei-zu is loosely defined and often arbitrarily applied.