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 central figures of the Tokyo bird-and-flower establishment in the first half of the twentieth century. Trained in Kanpō's studio and a fixture of the official Bunten and Teiten salons, Jippō belonged to the conservative, orthodox wing of Tokyo nihonga, prizing 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 Asanaga Teijirō on October 5, 1872, in Ōmura, Nagasaki Prefecture. He moved to Tokyo around 1892 to study painting under Araki Kanpō (1831-1915), a senior Meiji nihonga master, and was soon adopted into the Araki household as Kanpō's heir. Under Kanpō he 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 on Kanpō's death in 1915 he succeeded as the public bearer of the Araki name in the Tokyo nihonga world. The art-name Jippō (十畝) was chosen to echo Kanpō's own name (寛畝), the two sharing the character 畝 and marking the continuity of the lineage.

Jippō stood near the institutional center of late-Meiji and Taishō nihonga. He joined the Japan Art Association in 1895, helped found the Nihon Gakai (Japan Painting Association) in 1897, and in 1907 organized the Seiha Dōshikai (Orthodox School Society) as a conservative counterweight to the reformist currents in Japanese painting — the wing later embodied by the Nihon Bijutsuin revived by Yokoyama Taikan in 1914. He exhibited at the state-run Bunten (Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition) from its founding in 1907 and served as a juror at the Bunten and its successor the Teiten. From 1901 he taught, first as a lecturer and later as a professor, at the Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School, resigning in 1919. He was named a member of the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) in 1923, and again became a member when the academy was reorganized in 1937. In 1935 he was appointed a juror for the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition (Taiten), held under the Japanese colonial administration.

Jippō's mature style remained centered on the kachō-e specialty he had inherited from his adoptive father, combining the close observational drawing of the Araki lineage with selective borrowings from Western realism; critics have noted in his work both a debt to Edo Rinpa color and a freshness of palette that set it apart from stricter traditionalism. Among his best-known works is the set Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons (Shiki Kachō, 1917). He died on September 11, 1944, at the age of seventy-one, in the closing year of the Pacific War. His work is held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and other Japanese museum collections, where it continues to mark the conservative, formally disciplined wing of Taishō and early Shōwa nihonga.