Fujishima Takeji

Fujishima Takeji (藤島武二, 1867-1943) was one of the foundational figures of modern Japanese yōga (Western-style oil painting), an artist whose career carried the medium from its tentative late-Meiji experiments through the high romantic confidence of the Taishō and Shōwa periods, and whose four-decade tenure at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts placed him at the center of the institutional formation of Western painting in Japan. Born on 15 October 1867 in Kagoshima at the southern tip of Kyūshū, he came from an ex-samurai household: his father had served the Shimazu daimyō of the Satsuma Domain. The family transferred to Tokyo in his teens, and Fujishima's first formal art instruction came from Kawabata Gyokushō, a leading nihonga master in the Shijō-school tradition of literati landscape and bird-and-flower painting. The grounding in traditional Japanese brush idiom would remain visible throughout his Western-style work, most conspicuously in his late seascapes and ink-derived landscape compositions, but by the early 1890s Fujishima had turned decisively toward yōga.

His yōga training proceeded under Yamamoto Hōsui and Soyama Yukihiro, two of the most active first-generation Japanese oil painters to have studied in Europe. Yamamoto, who had worked in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme, gave Fujishima a direct conduit to academic French practice — careful figure construction, salon-scale historical subjects, disciplined drawing. Fujishima's 1891 entry to the Meiji Bijutsukai exhibition, a painting titled Cruelty, drew critical attention from the novelist and military physician Mori Ōgai. After a brief teaching appointment in Mie Prefecture in 1893, he was recalled to Tokyo in 1896 by Kuroda Seiki, the dominant figure of Meiji yōga, to join the newly established Western Painting Department at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, later Tokyo University of the Arts). He was simultaneously a founding member of the Hakubakai (White Horse Society), Kuroda's modernizing exhibition collective. The Hakubakai exhibitions became the principal showcase for Fujishima's most ambitious early work, including his most famous painting: Tenpyō no Omokage (天平の面影, Reminiscence of the Tempyō Era) of 1902, an oil-on-canvas figure of a barefoot female courtier holding a kugo harp before a gilded ground, first shown at the Seventh Hakuba-kai exhibition in Ueno Park in autumn 1902 and now designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan. The painting fused the vertical hanging-scroll proportions and gold-leaf ground of classical Japanese painting with the oil medium and academic figure drawing of Western practice, looking back across more than a millennium to the Nara-period Tempyō court, and confirmed Fujishima as the principal continuator of the literary-romantic strain in Japanese yōga.

In 1905 Fujishima received a Ministry of Education grant to study in Europe and spent the next five years moving between Paris, Rome, and a wide circuit of Italian, French, and North African sites. In Paris he enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and studied historical painting under Fernand Cormon, the academic master whose atelier had earlier counted Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He then transferred to Rome and worked under Carolus-Duran, director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici and famously John Singer Sargent's teacher, who reinforced his portrait practice. The European years produced Italian landscapes — views of the Campidoglio, the cypresses of Frascati's Villa Falconieri, the medieval hill towns of Umbria and Assisi, the gardens of Versailles — and a parallel sequence of female portraits, including the celebrated Black Fan (Kuroōgi, 1908-1909) and Ciociara, in which his drawing absorbed the silvery restraint of late nineteenth-century French portraiture and the warm light of the Italian campagna. He also travelled to Egypt and other North African sites, broadening the atmospheric vocabulary of Japanese oil painting.

Fujishima returned to Tokyo in 1910 as Professor of Western Painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, a position he held until 1935, and was named a member of the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin). The later decades saw a turn away from the dense Italianate compositions of his European years toward a luminous, often abstracted treatment of seascape and atmospheric effect, particularly in the long sequence of sunrise paintings he produced in the 1930s along the Japanese Pacific coast — at Cape Inubō, the Daiō Peninsula, Cape Muroto, and Yashima — and in his late Korean and Chinese landscapes following research travel in those territories. The sunrise paintings, with their broad horizontal bands of red, gold, and indigo, returned him to the abstracted color planes of his early Hakubakai work while drawing on the panoramic compositions he had absorbed from his nihonga apprenticeship. In 1937, in the first year of the newly instituted Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō), Fujishima was among the inaugural recipients. He died in Tokyo on 19 March 1943; his grave is at Aoyama Cemetery. His paintings are held by virtually every major Japanese museum with a yōga collection, including the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Artizon Museum (Ishibashi Foundation), the Tokyo National Museum, the Pola Museum of Art, the Yokosuka Museum of Art, the Mie Prefectural Art Museum, the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, and the Kagoshima City Museum of Art. Within the Japanese tradition he is understood as the most lyrical of Kuroda Seiki's generation — the artist who, more than any other, taught the oil medium to speak in a Japanese romantic voice.