Chigusa Sōun

Chigusa Sōun (千種掃雲, 1873-1944) was a Kyoto-born nihonga painter and printmaker whose career spans the late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods, and whose name is most widely recognised today through a single botanical print series — the Yō Sōka Fu (Western Flowers Series), issued in the early 1920s by the Kyoto publisher Maria Gabou (Marusan Shoten). He occupies an interesting middle position in the cultural ecology of his generation: a Kyoto-trained Japanese-style painter who studied also under a leading Western-style oil painter, and who in his maturity helped channel the kachō-e bird-and-flower tradition into the orbit of the early twentieth-century shin-hanga publishing world.

Sōun's training combined the two dominant currents of Meiji-period art education. He studied nihonga (Japanese-style painting) under Takeuchi Seihō (1864-1942), the Shijō-lineage master who by the 1900s had emerged as Kyoto's most influential teacher of traditional painting and a frequent jury member at the Bunten exhibitions. Through Seihō's atelier Sōun received the careful brush training, sketching-from-nature discipline, and animal-and-flower repertoire that defined the Shijō tradition. In parallel he studied Western-style painting (yōga) under Asai Chū (1856-1907), the pioneering oil painter who returned from Paris with a plein-air sensibility and helped establish yōga teaching in Kyoto at what would become the Kyoto Higher School of Arts and Crafts. The double training — at once Shijō nihonga and Asai-school yōga — was relatively unusual, and it left a permanent mark on Sōun's mature work, which characteristically marries the disciplined botanical observation of late Shijō nature studies with a softer, more atmospheric handling of light and ground than is typical of pure Kyoto nihonga.

In 1906 Sōun became one of the founders of Heigo-kai (also rendered Hyōgo or Heigo), a small Kyoto-based artists' society whose program called for an art more responsive to contemporary social conditions and more open to Western pictorial ideas than the conservative mainstream of the Kyoto nihonga establishment. The Heigo-kai is now a footnote in art-history surveys, but at the time it was one of several Meiji-Taishō dissident groupings — alongside circles around Takeuchi Seihō's younger students, the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai, and others — that signaled the readiness of Kyoto painters to push beyond the academy. Sōun exhibited at the Bunten and Teiten salons and at Kyoto's regional exhibitions through the 1910s and 1920s with moderate success.

From 1914 Sōun taught at the Kyoto Higher School of Arts and Crafts (Kyōto Kōtō Kōgei Gakkō), where his colleagues included other Kyoto modernists and where he came into contact with the publisher and craft circles that would soon bring his designs into print form. The school's mandate to bridge fine art and applied design — alongside Kyoto's strength as a textile and ceramic centre — fed naturally into the publishing project for which he is now best remembered.

In the early 1920s the Kyoto publisher Maria Gabou (Marusan Shoten) commissioned Sōun to produce a series of woodblock prints depicting Western flowering plants — cattleya, dendrobium, gloxinia, canna, primula, petunia, amaryllis, brassica, sobralia, epidendrum, streptocarpus and others. The series, titled Yō Sōka Fu (洋草花譜, literally 'Album of Western Plants and Flowers'), draws on Sōun's nihonga training in flower painting but reorients it toward the exotic horticultural subjects that were becoming fashionable in Taishō-period Japanese plant culture. The prints typically measure ōban size and are executed in soft, layered colour with sparing use of outline — a manner closer to nihonga brush-painting reproduced in print than to traditional ukiyo-e woodblock work. When Sōun's design output for the series ran short, Maria Gabou commissioned the rising shin-hanga botanical artist Tsuchiya Rakusan (1896-1976) to fill out the series in the same manner, which is one reason Sōun and Rakusan are sometimes confused or co-attributed in dealer catalogues.

The Yō Sōka Fu is the basis of Sōun's reputation in the modern collecting market. Single sheets appear regularly in specialist Japanese-print dealer catalogues — Panteek, Ronin Gallery, Reiwa Antiques and others — but the series has had limited penetration into the major Western museum print collections, and Sōun does not appear in the open-access databases of the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum, or British Museum at the time of writing. Holdings of the series in Japanese institutions, including the National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto, are more substantial.

Chigusa Sōun's place in Japanese print history is therefore a quiet but distinctive one. He is not a shin-hanga star in the mould of Hasui or Yoshida; he is not a sōsaku-hanga radical in the mould of Onchi; he is not a kachō-e specialist in the mould of his older Kyoto contemporary Kōno Bairei. He is, instead, a Kyoto nihonga painter who became — through his teaching, his late-Meiji dissident affiliations, and one elegant publisher's commission — a transitional figure between the Shijō tradition of nature-from-life painting and the Taishō-Shōwa fashion for finely printed botanical hanga. He died in 1944, in the last year of the war.