Hayami Gyoshū

Hayami Gyoshū (速水御舟, 1894-1935), recorded in some older English-language sources under the alternate reading Hayami Shungyō, was one of the defining figures of early twentieth-century nihonga (Japanese-style painting). Across a short but extraordinarily concentrated career he moved from precocious Edo-toned bird-and-flower studies into a singular late style — exact, austere, and saturated with mineral pigment and gold — that placed him at the center of Taishō and early Shōwa Japanese painting and made him the touchstone of the Yamatane Museum of Art's now-canonical modern nihonga collection.

He was born Maita Eiichi (蒔田栄一) on August 2, 1894, in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, the second son of a pawnbroker. From childhood he showed a strong inclination for drawing, and in 1908, at age fourteen, he entered the Angadō Gajuku (安雅堂画塾), the painting school run by Matsumoto Fūko (松本楓湖), a leading exponent of the Edo-derived historical and yamato-e painting tradition. There he received the name Yoshikawa Eiichi and then Yoshikawa Shōen, but in 1914 he adopted the studio name Hayami Gyoshū (御舟, literally 'imperial boat'), the name under which his mature career unfolded; in English-language print catalogues of the mid-twentieth century the same characters were occasionally read as 'Shungyō,' an alternate gloss that has survived into a handful of reference works.

From 1914 onward Gyoshū exhibited with the Kōji-kai (Red Hill Society), a study circle organized around Imamura Shikō and Hayami's friend Yasuda Yukihiko, and from 1915 with the reorganized Inten — the exhibitions of the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute), then the most progressive of the nihonga societies, presided over by Yokoyama Taikan and Shimomura Kanzan. He was elected a sub-member of the Inten in 1917 and a full member in 1920, while still in his mid-twenties, an unusually rapid ascent that placed him beside an older generation of nihonga reformers. During these years he painted in a meticulous, archaicizing manner that drew on Rinpa, early ukiyo-e, and Edo bird-and-flower painting, producing closely observed works such as Mount Hiei (1920, Tokyo National Museum), Kyoto Maiko (1920), and Tea Bowl and Fruit (1921, Yamatane Museum) that already display the calm precision of his later style.

The great works of his maturity belong to the second half of the 1920s. Dancing in the Flames (Enbu, 1925; designated an Important Cultural Property), painted at his summer studio in Karuizawa after months of observing moths drawn nightly to a bonfire, suspends a column of gold-mineral flame and circling moths against a black ground, condensing the imagery of vanitas, ritual fire, and Buddhist transience into one of the most recognizable Japanese paintings of the twentieth century. Camellia Petals Scattering (Meiju sanchin, 1929; also an Important Cultural Property), a pair of two-panel screens depicting the famous five-colored, double-blossom 'scattering camellia' of Jizō-in temple in Kyoto's Kitayama, presents the tree on a gold ground in which each petal is rendered as a single isolated specimen — a meditation on impermanence with the structure of a botanical chart. Other key works of the period include Houses in Kyoto and Houses in Nara (both 1927, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), Peony (1926), Insects, Two Subjects (1926), and Emerald Mosses and Verdant Grass (1928), a pair of four-panel screens in which gold leaf hammered to one to two ten-thousandths of a millimeter forms the ground for an austere study of moss and grass.

In 1930 Gyoshū traveled to Europe as a delegate to the Roman Exhibition of Japanese Art, visiting Italy, France, and Egypt and producing a series of European and Middle Eastern subjects on his return. His late style was extraordinarily disciplined, employing fine outline, layered mineral pigments (gunjō, rokushō), gold ground, and gold powder (kindei) in ways that drew equally on Rinpa decorative tradition and on the close observational habits of early nihonga reform. He died suddenly in March 1935 from typhoid fever at the age of forty.

Gyoshū's legacy in modern Japanese painting is anchored by the Yamatane Museum of Art in Tokyo, which in 1976 acquired 105 of his paintings from the Ataka Collection to bring its total Gyoshū holdings to roughly 120 works — by far the largest single concentration of his work anywhere in the world and the reason the museum is sometimes informally called 'the Hayami Museum.' Major individual paintings are also held by the Tokyo National Museum and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and his Important Cultural Property designations (Dancing in the Flames, Camellia Petals Scattering, and Emerald Mosses and Verdant Grass) confirm his standing as one of the central nihonga masters of the early Shōwa era. For collectors and historians of modern Japanese art he sits beside Yokoyama Taikan, Shimomura Kanzan, and Tomioka Tessai as a defining figure in the early twentieth-century reinvention of Japanese-style painting.