Araki Kanpo

Araki Kanpo (1831-1915) was a leading Japanese painter of the Meiji period, a senior figure in the late nineteenth-century revival of nihonga, and one of the foremost specialists of kachō-e (bird-and-flower painting) of his generation. Born in Edo (Tokyo) and trained successively in the Edo Nanga tradition, in mid-Meiji Western-style oil painting, and finally in a synthesized nihonga manner of his own, Kanpo built a career that traversed the entire transition from Bakumatsu painting to the institutionalized art world of late Meiji Japan, culminating in his appointment as professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1898 and as a member of the Imperial Household Art Committee (Teishitsu Gigeiin) in 1900.

Kanpo was born on July 24, 1831, in the Shiba district of Edo, the fourth son of the Tanaka family. At the age of nine he began studying painting under Araki Kankai, a painter in the Nanga (Southern School) lineage descended from Tani Bunchō, and at twenty-two he was adopted into Kankai's household, taking the Araki surname under which he would become known; the art name Kanpo (寛畝), with which he signed throughout his career, dates from this period. In 1859 he was appointed official painter to the Tosa domain under Yamauchi Yōdō (Toyoshige), one of the more powerful daimyō of the late Tokugawa period; the Tosa appointment placed him within the formal painting establishment of the Bakumatsu and gave him a stipend and a sustained practical training in the formal repertoire of bird-and-flower, landscape, and figure painting expected of a domain painter.

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 dissolved the daimyō system and removed the institutional supports of his early career, Kanpo turned in the 1870s to the new field of yōga (Western-style oil painting), studying under Kawakami Tōgai (1827-1881), one of the founding figures of Meiji oil painting, the British illustrator Charles Wirgman (1832-1891), and the painter Kunisawa Shinkurō (1848-1877). For roughly a decade he worked as an oil painter; in 1879 he was among the artists commissioned to produce imperial portraits, completing a celebrated official portrait of the Empress Dowager Eishō. By the mid-1880s, however, the cultural climate had shifted: Ernest Fenollosa, Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzō), and their allies had begun to argue forcefully for the defense and modernization of native Japanese painting, and Kanpo, like a number of other Meiji painters of his generation, returned decisively to nihonga and to the kachō-e specialty for which he would be best remembered.

Kanpo's second career as a nihonga painter unfolded in the institutional structures of the new Meiji art world. He exhibited at the Paris exhibition of 1884, and at the third Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai (Domestic Industrial Exposition) of 1890 his peacock painting was awarded the second-rank prize for excellent skill and purchased by the imperial household, establishing him as the leading peacock specialist of the era. His peacock designs were also translated into cloisonné enamel — a cloisonné peacock executed after his design survives in the Khalili Collection of Japanese Art — and his later international honors included a silver medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 and a second-place award at the St. Louis World's Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) of 1904.

Alongside his exhibition career, Kanpo was a central teacher of the next generation of Tokyo nihonga painters. From the early 1890s he held appointments at the Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School (1893) and the Women's Peers' School (Joshi Gakushūin, 1894), and in 1898 he was appointed professor of painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō) in succession to Hashimoto Gahō; by the late 1890s he had trained more than forty male and over thirty female pupils, the most famous of whom was Araki Jippō (1872-1944), who took the Araki name and carried the kachō-e specialty into the Taishō and Shōwa periods. In 1900 Kanpo was named a member of the Imperial Household Art Committee, the highest official recognition then available to a Japanese painter, and was decorated with the Sixth-Class Order of the Sacred Treasure.

Kanpo's pictorial style combined the close observation of birds, flowers, and plants that had been the strength of the Nanga tradition with the spatial habits and atmospheric effects he had absorbed during his oil-painting years. He was particularly known for his peacocks, an interest he shared with his early teacher Okamoto Shūki, who was himself celebrated for his peacock paintings, and his cranes, roosters, and other ceremonial birds were widely regarded as among the strongest of the Meiji nihonga tradition. He died in Tokyo on June 2, 1915, at the age of eighty-five, and was buried at Tama Cemetery. His work survives in the collections of the Imperial Household (Sannomaru Shōzōkan, Museum of the Imperial Collections), the Tokyo National Museum, the University Art Museum at the Tokyo University of the Arts, the Khalili Collection of Japanese Art, and other Japanese and Western institutions, where it continues to mark the high point of Meiji-period kachō-e and the institutional consolidation of the nihonga tradition at the end of the nineteenth century.