Araki Jippo

Araki Jippō (1872-1944) was a leading Japanese nihonga painter of the late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods, the principal heir to his adoptive father Araki Kanpō's kachō-e (bird-and-flower painting) lineage, and one of the most institutionally central figures of the Tokyo bird-and-flower establishment in the first half of the twentieth century. Trained inside the Araki Tōgaku-en academy, decorated repeatedly at the official Bunten and Teiten salons, and active for nearly two decades as a juror at the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition (Taiten) under the Japanese colonial administration, Jippō represented the formal, conservative wing of Tokyo nihonga that prized close observation, decorative discipline, and the painterly virtues of the Edo kachō-e tradition rather than the more experimental currents that flowed through Kyoto and the Nihon Bijutsuin around him.

Jippō was born Tashiro Teijirō on October 5, 1872, in Ōmura, Nagasaki Prefecture, the son of a former samurai of the Ōmura domain. He moved to Tokyo in 1892 at the age of nineteen to study painting and entered the academy of Araki Kanpō (1831-1915), the senior Meiji nihonga master who was then preparing to take up his appointment as professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Inside Kanpō's Araki Tōgaku-en (literally, 'School of Eastern Studies'), Jippō absorbed the close observation of birds and flowers, the careful drawing of feathering and petal structure, and the atmospheric handling of background space that constituted the Araki kachō-e method. He proved one of Kanpō's most gifted pupils, and in 1900 he married Kanpō's adopted daughter Mitsuko (also a painter under the name Araki Shōhō), formally entering the Araki household; in 1915, on Kanpō's death, he succeeded as the head of the Tōgaku-en academy and as the public bearer of the Araki name in the Tokyo nihonga world. The art-name Jippō (十畝, literally 'ten mu' — an old land measurement) was chosen to echo Kanpō's own Kanpō (寛畝), marking the continuity of the lineage.

Jippō's exhibition career placed him at the institutional center of late-Meiji and Taishō nihonga. He showed regularly at the Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai (Domestic Industrial Exposition) from the late 1890s and at the new state-run Bunten (Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition) from its founding in 1907; his work was awarded prizes at successive Bunten salons through the 1910s, and he served as a juror at the Bunten and its successors the Teiten and the Shin-Bunten from the late 1910s onward. In 1919 he co-founded the conservative Tatsumi-gakai (Tatsumi Painting Society) with Yūki Somei, Matsubayashi Keigetsu, and other senior Tokyo nihonga painters as a counterweight to the more experimental Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute) revived by Yokoyama Taikan and Shimomura Kanzan in 1914; the Tatsumi-gakai held annual exhibitions and represented the formal, decoratively disciplined wing of Tokyo nihonga that Jippō himself embodied. He was named a member of the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) in 1928 and was appointed professor of nihonga at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1936, the same chair his adoptive father Kanpō had held nearly forty years earlier.

Alongside his Tokyo career, Jippō was for many years one of the most active Japanese painters in colonial Taiwan, where he traveled repeatedly between 1927 and 1936 as a juror at the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition (Taiten) organized by the Government-General of Taiwan. He brought representative works of his own to display at each visit as 'model works' (mohan-saku) for the local Taiwanese and Japanese painters competing in the salon's tōyōga (Eastern-style painting) division, and his bird-and-flower compositions in particular were widely emulated by the painters of the Taiwan tōyōga school in the late 1920s and 1930s. The 1935 Taiten was among the most consequential of these visits, and his work shown that year was remembered by Taiwanese critics for decades afterward. His role in Taiwan is now recognized as one of the principal channels by which the Tokyo nihonga tradition entered the colonial-period Taiwan art world.

Jippō's mature pictorial style remained centered on the kachō-e specialty he had inherited from his adoptive father, but he combined the close drawing of the Maruyama-Shijō and Edo Nanga lineages with selective borrowings from Western painting that gave his compositions a subtle perspectival depth and a controlled atmospheric handling of light that distinguished his work from the flatter decoration of the Rinpa revival and from the more expressionist freedom of the contemporary Bijutsuin painters. His best-known works are the large set 'Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons' (Shiki Kachō, 1917), a four-panel suite of hanging scrolls now in the Yamatane Museum of Art in Tokyo, and his many ink-only kachō-e of the late 1930s and early 1940s, in which he abandoned color for a refreshed monochrome idiom that critics regarded as one of the late achievements of the Meiji-Taishō kachō-e tradition. He died in Tokyo on September 11, 1944, at the age of seventy-one, in the closing months of the Pacific War. His work survives in the Yamatane Museum of Art, the Tokyo National Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and in many private and institutional collections in Japan and abroad, where it continues to mark the conservative, formally disciplined wing of Taishō and early Shōwa nihonga.