Hirafuku Hyakusui

Hirafuku Hyakusui (1877-1933) was a leading nihonga painter, illustrator, and poet of the late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods, principally known for the cool clarity of his landscape and figure painting in the lineage of the Maruyama-Shijō school as renovated through the Tokyo nihonga reform movement of the early twentieth century. Born in Kakunodate in Akita Prefecture in northern Japan, Hyakusui was the son of Hirafuku Suian (1844-1890), himself a respected Akita-region nihonga painter trained in the Maruyama-Shijō tradition; this domestic apprenticeship under his father gave the younger Hyakusui an early grounding in shasei (sketching from life) and in the discipline of bird-and-flower (kachō-e) and animal painting that would remain central to his work throughout his life.

After his father's death in 1890, Hyakusui continued his studies independently before moving to Tokyo in 1894 to enter the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō), where he studied in the Japanese-painting (nihonga) department under Kawabata Gyokushō (1842-1913), a senior Maruyama-Shijō painter who served as one of the founding professors of the school. Hyakusui graduated in 1899 and immediately entered the world of Meiji Tokyo painting at a moment of intense debate over the direction of nihonga: between the Imperial Art Academy faction loyal to Okakura Tenshin and the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute) on one hand, and the more conservative Maruyama-Shijō and Kanō-school traditions sustained at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts on the other. Hyakusui's response was to develop a sharply observed naturalism — sober, atmospheric, and free of decorative excess — that drew on the Maruyama-Shijō discipline of his training while absorbing the compositional clarity of Western painting through the school's mixed curriculum.

In 1901, together with Yūki Somei (1875-1957), Hirano Hisashi, and Ishii Hakutei, Hyakusui co-founded the Mugonkai ("Silent Society"), a small artists' group that championed a quieter, more austere nihonga oriented around landscape and everyday figure subjects, in contrast to the historicizing grandiloquence of the Nihon Bijutsuin's nationalist nihonga and the brilliance of late Meiji decorative painting. The Mugonkai's exhibitions through the early 1900s established Hyakusui as one of the most thoughtful younger nihonga painters of his generation, and his reputation grew steadily through participation in the Bunten (Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition, established 1907) and its successors the Teiten and Inten, where he showed and won prizes throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

Alongside his painting practice, Hyakusui was unusually active as a book illustrator and as a participant in the literary and printmaking world of late Meiji and Taishō Tokyo. He illustrated several novels by the major writer Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916), including Kusamakura (1906) and Buncho (1908), in fine line drawing reproduced through woodblock; the Kusamakura plates in particular established his reputation for evocative, restrained book illustration that complemented Sōseki's prose. He also contributed designs to the multi-artist series Japanese Landscapes (Nihon fūkei), an early sōsaku-hanga (creative print) and shin-hanga era collaboration carved by the celebrated Igami Bonkotsu and published by Nakajima Jūtarō in 1917; Hyakusui's contribution forms the third volume of the set, devoted to the Tōhoku region of his native Akita Prefecture, and survives in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and other Western collections as an important example of late-1910s Japanese color woodblock work. He was a published tanka poet as well, associated with the Araragi poetry circle and the journal of the same name from the 1900s onward, and his collected poetry was published posthumously.

In 1916 Hyakusui co-founded the Kinreisha (Golden Bell Society) with Yūki Somei, Kaburaki Kiyokata, and other senior nihonga painters, an exhibition society that played an important role in the Taishō-period reform of nihonga. He was appointed a professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1929 and elected a member of the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) in 1930, the highest official recognition then available to a Japanese painter. He continued exhibiting major works through the early 1930s — including the Spring Mountain (Haruyama) of 1933, which is widely cited as one of his finest landscape paintings — until his sudden death later that year at the age of 56. He was buried in Tokyo, and major retrospective exhibitions of his work have since been held at the Akita Museum of Modern Art, the Akita Senshu Museum of Art (which holds the largest single concentration of his paintings), and the Tokyo National Museum, which holds several of his hanging scrolls in its permanent collection.

Hyakusui's significance for the history of Japanese printmaking lies less in a large body of independent prints — his output in the medium is relatively modest — than in his deep involvement in the world of early twentieth-century book illustration and in the experimental, multi-artist landscape print projects of the 1910s that bridged the late ukiyo-e tradition, the emerging shin-hanga movement of Watanabe Shōzaburō, and the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement of Yamamoto Kanae and Onchi Kōshirō. As a painter he is remembered for a restrained, clear-eyed nihonga style that maintained the Maruyama-Shijō discipline of close natural observation while absorbing the compositional logic of European painting; among collectors of modern Japanese art today he is valued especially for his northern landscape paintings, his bird and animal pictures, and his Natsume Sōseki book illustrations.