Furuya Kōrin

Furuya Kōrin (古谷紅麟, 1875-1910) was a Kyoto-based designer, illustrator, and editor of the Meiji period whose woodblock-printed pattern books (zuanshū / zuanchō) defined the visual language of late-Meiji Japanese decorative arts and helped carry a modernized Rinpa aesthetic into the international Japonisme of the early twentieth century. In a career of barely fifteen years he produced design albums for Yamada Unsōdō that remain reference points for the kimono and lacquer trades and for the history of Japanese design publishing.

Furuya was born in 1875 in Kaizu, Shiga Prefecture, and moved to Kyoto in his youth, training in the city's overlapping circles of Maruyama-Shijō painting and decorative design — a milieu being deliberately marshalled by city and prefectural authorities into Japan's first organized programmes of industrial art education. His teachers included Suzuki Mannen, a Kyoto Shijō painter; Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942), the architect of Kyoto's neo-Rinpa revival; and the yōga painter Asai Chū (1856-1907), then teaching at the Kyoto Higher School of Crafts. The combination gave Furuya classical Kyoto bird-and-flower painting from the Shijō line, Rinpa-derived decorative composition from Sekka, and the structural drawing discipline of late-nineteenth-century European academic training from Asai. In 1897 he won the painting category of the Shinkō Bijutsu Tenrankai, marking his arrival in the Kyoto art world.

From the early 1900s Furuya began publishing the design albums for which he is now best remembered. These were not painting manuals in the older ehon tradition (such as Hokusai's manga) but zuanchō or zuanshū — orihon-format sample books of decorative motifs intended for working artisans in textile, lacquer, metalwork, and ceramic workshops, and for the design-conscious public the Meiji crafts trades had created. Issued by Yamada Unsōdō under proprietor Yamada Naosaburō, his series included Unkashū (Clouds and Mist, 1903), Kodai moyō chōchō (Birds and Butterflies in Patterns from the Past, 1906), Shasei sōka moyō (Patterns of Flowers and Grasses Drawn from Life, 1907), Kōrin moyō (Designs in the Style of Kōrin, 1907), Shima shima (Stripes, 1904), and orihon volumes devoted to pine, bamboo, and plum. Each book deployed the technical apparatus Kyoto colour printing had perfected by the late Meiji: many-colour woodblock impressions, generous use of metallic and mineral pigments, embossed (karazuri) backgrounds, and burnished gold and silver overlays giving the printed page the optical richness of lacquer or embroidered textile. In 1903 he also designed the orihon album Sixteen Illustrations of Ancient Ceremonial Displays, an iconographic project drawing on Rinpa and yamato-e antiquarianism, today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Furuya's most public role was as editor of the design journal Shin-Bijutsukai (新美術海, "New Ocean of Art"), published by Unsōdō and issued in some thirty-six volumes from 1901. Supervised by Kamisaka Sekka and edited by Furuya, the journal solicited single-page designs from leading Kyoto artists and reproduced them as colour woodblock plates with sample patterns, kimono motifs, and decorative compositions in the neo-Rinpa idiom. Shin-Bijutsukai transformed the Japanese design periodical from a trade utility into a vibrant artistic medium of its own, and its plates fed directly into the kimono, lacquer, and metalwork industries clustered around Kyoto's Nishijin and Kiyamachi districts. The journal is widely regarded as one of the foundational documents of modern Japanese graphic design, studied today alongside Sekka's Momoyogusa (1909) as a key text of Kyoto's neo-Rinpa moment. From 1905 until his death, Furuya also served as an assistant professor at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. He died in 1910 at the age of only thirty-five. His pseudonym Kōrin (紅麟) deliberately invoked Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716), the great Edo-period Rinpa master also working from Kyoto, and contemporaries described him as a "Kōrin of the modern age".