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. From childhood he showed a strong inclination for drawing, and in 1908 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. Fūko gave him the art name Kako (禾湖) in 1909, which he later changed to Kōnen (浩然); around the same time he was adopted by his maternal grandmother and took the family name Hayami. In 1914 he assumed the art name Gyoshū (御舟), under which his mature career unfolded — characters that in a few older English-language reference works were rendered by the alternate reading 'Shungyō.'

Around 1911 he joined the Kōjikai, a study circle of young painters organized around Imamura Shikō that also numbered his friend Yasuda Yukihiko, and from the mid-1910s he was associated with the revived Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute) — whose Inten exhibitions were then the most progressive of the nihonga societies, presided over by Yokoyama Taikan and Shimomura Kanzan. Named a friend of the Institute in 1914, he was elected a member in 1917, while still in his early 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 — among them Kyoto Maiko and Tea Bowl and Fruit — 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-fold screens depicting the famous five-colored, double-blossom 'scattering camellia' of Jizō-in temple in Kyoto, 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), Insects, Two Subjects (1926), and Emerald Mosses and Verdant Grass (1928), a pair of screens whose gold ground sets off an austere study of moss and grass.

In 1930 Gyoshū traveled to Europe as a delegate to the Rome 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 acquired a major group of his paintings from the Ataka Collection, bringing 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 'Gyoshū Museum.' Major individual paintings are also held by the Tokyo National Museum and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and his two Important Cultural Property designations — Dancing in the Flames and Camellia Petals Scattering — 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.