Hashimoto Meiji

Hashimoto Meiji (橋本明治, 1904–1991) was one of the leading Shōwa-period nihonga painters of his generation, a senior figure in the Nitten exhibition system, a designated Person of Cultural Merit, and, from 1974, a recipient of the Order of Culture, Japan's highest honour for contributions to the arts. He is remembered for a postwar pictorial style of unusual graphic clarity — strong, deliberate outlines drawn in sumi ink, flat planes of saturated mineral pigment, and decorative subjects drawn from the world of geisha and maiko, classical dance, cranes and other auspicious birds, and the ornament of imperial and religious architecture. Within twentieth-century nihonga his work occupies a position between the academic refinement of his teachers and the more graphic, design-conscious manner that would dominate official painting in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hashimoto was born on 5 August 1904 in Hamada-machi, Naka District, Shimane Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast, the eldest son of Hashimoto Taiichirō and his wife Tome. His childhood environment was a literate one: his grandfather Ichitarō was a keen amateur of painting and haikai poetry whose tastes seem to have shaped Meiji's early interest in art. After finishing local schooling he made his way to Tokyo and in 1926 entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, today the Tokyo University of the Arts). He graduated at the top of his class in 1931 and studied under Matsuoka Eikyū (1881–1938), a master of the yamato-e revival whose meticulous historical and figural compositions gave Meiji his foundation in classical Japanese pictorial method.

Under Matsuoka's guidance Hashimoto exhibited at the Teiten and its successor the Shin-Bunten, the official government salons, winning honours that made him one of the standout young painters of the late 1930s. The defining experience of his middle years, however, was not the salon system but a vast collective copying project: through the 1940s he was among the painters entrusted with making full-scale reproductions of the wall paintings of the Hōryū-ji Golden Hall (Kondō), the seventh- and early-eighth-century Buddhist murals long regarded as a foundation of Japanese painting. Responsible for several of the wall sections, he worked alongside such nihonga painters as Nakamura Gakuryō, Arai Kanpō, and Irie Hakō. When the originals were severely damaged by fire on 26 January 1949 the reproductions became an important record of the lost works, and Hashimoto returned to the murals in the late 1960s for a second campaign of copies. His years on the Hōryū-ji project gave him an intimate working knowledge of the line-and-mineral-pigment idiom of early Japanese Buddhist painting that would mark his postwar style.

From the late 1940s onward Hashimoto reorganised his practice around the Nitten, the postwar successor to the official salon system; he took part in founding the short-lived Sōzō Bijutsu group in 1948 before returning to the mainstream exhibition, where he was appointed a judge in 1952 and a councillor in 1958. Through these years his pictures grew progressively more graphic: dancers, maiko, and standing female figures in kimono were rendered with broad black contour lines and large, unmodulated areas of vermillion, indigo, white, and gold, an aesthetic close in spirit to the design vocabulary of kimono and lacquerware. His portrait Mari Chiyo (Marichiyo-zō) exemplifies this manner, while cranes and other auspicious subjects recur throughout his later work; through the Nitten's selection processes he exerted considerable influence on younger nihonga painters.

Hashimoto received the Japan Art Academy Prize in 1955 for the portrait Mari Chiyo, and in 1971 was appointed a member of the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Geijutsuin). In 1974 he was both named a Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kōrōsha) and awarded the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō), placing him among the small circle of postwar nihonga painters to receive the country's highest artistic distinction. His most prominent public commission was a large painting, Sakura (Cherry Blossoms), measuring roughly 2.74 by 2.5 metres, made for the cedar door of the east corridor of the Seiden hall in the new Tokyo Imperial Palace, completed in 1968.

Though Hashimoto worked primarily in painted media — silk and paper in the folding-screen and sliding-door formats characteristic of nihonga — his emphatic outlines and flat colour lend his compositions a graphic, print-like quality, and it is largely through reproductions that his images have circulated among print collectors. His paintings remain almost exclusively in Japanese collections; in his native Shimane, a Hashimoto Meiji Memorial Room opened at the Shimane Prefectural Museum in 1987, following works he had donated in the mid-1980s. He died in Tokyo on 25 March 1991 at the age of eighty-six.