Taniguchi Kōkyō

Taniguchi Kōkyō (谷口香嶠, 1864-1915) was a Kyoto nihonga painter of the late Meiji and early Taishō periods, one of the most accomplished Maruyama-Shijō-trained kachō-e and figure painters of his generation, and a central figure in the Kyoto painting circles that produced Takeuchi Seihō, Kikuchi Hōbun, Yamamoto Shunkyo, and Tsuji Kakō. Born in Osaka on the sixteenth of September, 1864, with the childhood name Tsuji Tsuchinosuke (辻槌之助), he was adopted into the Taniguchi family of Kyoto, took the family name by which he is known, and trained under Suzuki Hyakunen (1825-1891) — the same Kyoto Shijō master who taught Imao Keinen — before continuing his studies under Kōno Bairei (1844-1895), the dominant figure of late-nineteenth-century Kyoto painting. From these two teachers Kōkyō absorbed both the disciplined shasei (sketching from life) tradition descended from Maruyama Ōkyo and the late-Edo Shijō habit of placing closely observed birds, animals, and figures against generous, atmospheric negative space.

Kōkyō built his reputation primarily as a painter rather than a print designer, exhibiting at the major national painting competitions of the Meiji period — the Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai, the Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai exhibitions, and from 1907 onward the Bunten — and receiving early recognition for figure paintings drawn from classical Japanese and Chinese subjects (the Battle of Uji from the Heike monogatari, scenes from the Noh repertoire, Tang-dynasty Chinese themes) as well as for bird-and-flower compositions in the Shijō manner. He was active in the Kyoto Bijutsu Kyōkai (Kyoto Art Association) and in the cluster of teaching and exhibiting bodies that defended Kyoto's painting tradition through the long Meiji confrontation with Tokyo and with the emerging yōga (Western-style) movement, and he was appointed to the teaching staff of the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts (Kyōto-shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō), the institution that supplied the next generation of Kyoto nihonga painters with their formal training.

Kōkyō contributed to several of the major Kyoto woodblock book and album projects of the late Meiji period. He participated in collaborative ehon and gajō organized by the Unsōdō publishing house and circulated through the Kyoto art-book trade — among them the Kyoto prentenboek and related Kyoto picture books that brought together Takeuchi Seihō, Kikuchi Hōbun, Yamamoto Shunkyo, Tsuji Kakō, and Kōkyō within a single volume — and his designs for the painted lacquer-on-wood plate set held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (c. 1910) demonstrate his comfort working across mediums. His best-known single print subject is Sagi musume (鷺娘, Heron Maiden), a figure drawn from the eighteenth-century kabuki dance of the same name in which a heron-spirit takes the form of a young woman, and which Kōkyō treated in several variant compositions that survive across multiple institutional collections (the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Harvard Art Museums). These Sagi musume prints, dating from around the end of his life and continuing posthumously in the Taishō period, place the white-robed figure against an indeterminate ground with the gauffrage and subtle bokashi gradation that the high-end Kyoto block-printing trade had developed by the 1910s.

Alongside his print designs and Kyoto book contributions, Kōkyō produced a substantial body of hanging-scroll and screen paintings on silk and paper. Among the subjects documented in his surviving work are samurai narrative scenes (notably the Battle of Uji of 1184, depicting two warriors crossing the Uji River, a paradigm subject of Heike monogatari painting), rooster and bird studies in the kachō tradition learned from Hyakunen and Bairei, and figure paintings of Noh subjects. He was also involved in the Russo-Japanese War print boom of 1904-1905, contributing several senso-e (war prints) for the Tokyo publishers who scrambled to document the conflict for a popular audience. His teaching activity in Kyoto, alongside Seihō and Hōbun, contributed to the formation of the next generation of Kyoto nihonga painters — Uemura Shōen, Tsuchida Bakusen, and others — who shaped the early twentieth-century revival of Japanese-style painting.

Kōkyō died in Kyoto on the ninth of November, 1915, at the age of fifty-one, before he could secure the institutional honors (Teishitsu Gigeiin appointment, Imperial Academy membership) that his peers Seihō and Hōbun would later accumulate, but his work was widely collected in his lifetime and circulated quickly through the early twentieth-century Japanese-print collecting market in Europe and the United States. His prints survive today in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major institutional collections, and his paintings continue to appear in the Japanese auction market and in Kyoto-school exhibition catalogues, where he is recognized as one of the strongest representatives of the late-Meiji Kyoto Shijō line between Bairei's generation and the full-fledged twentieth-century Kyoto nihonga movement.