Honda Kinkichirō

Honda Kinkichirō (本多錦吉郎, 1850-1921) was a pioneering Meiji-era yōga (Western-style) painter, art educator and writer whose career bridged the first generation of Japanese oil painters trained by foreign teachers and the institutionalised Western-painting establishment that emerged in Tokyo from the 1880s onward. Although now overshadowed by his celebrated pupils — Maruyama Banka, Ogawa Usen and Shimomura Izan among them — and by the towering figures of Kuroda Seiki and Asai Chū who reshaped Meiji yōga from 1893 onward, Honda was for two decades the most influential drawing master in Tokyo and the principal author of the textbooks through which generations of Japanese schoolchildren first encountered Western linear perspective, geometric construction and human anatomy.

Honda was born in 1850 in Hiroshima, into a samurai family of the Asano domain. He moved to Tokyo in the early Meiji years and from 1874 studied Western painting under Kunisawa Shinkurō (1847-1877), one of the first Japanese painters to have trained in oils in England and the founder of the Shōgidō (彰技堂), a private Western-painting academy in the Kyōbashi district of Tokyo. On Kunisawa's premature death from tuberculosis in 1877, the twenty-seven-year-old Honda took over the directorship of the school and ran it as the principal private institution for the teaching of yōga in Tokyo through the 1880s, the years before the founding of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (1887) and the Meiji Bijutsukai (1889).

From 1884 Honda took up the chair of drawing at both the Army Officer School (Rikugun Shikan Gakkō) and the Naval Academy (Kaigun Heigakkō), a position he held for twenty years. Through these posts and through his work for the Ministry of Education he became the dominant figure in mid-Meiji drawing pedagogy. Beginning in 1880 he gave a weekly lecture on artistic anatomy, the first formal course on the subject in Japan, and his translations and adaptations of European treatises on perspective, geometric drawing and human proportion shaped the curriculum of the elementary and middle-school drawing manuals that the Ministry of Education distributed throughout the country. His 1895 textbook Gagaku Kōhon (画学綱領, Outline of the Study of Painting) was for some years the standard introduction to Western drawing in Japanese schools.

Honda's own painting practice ran in parallel with this pedagogical work. From 1889 he was a founding member of the Meiji Bijutsukai (Meiji Art Society), the first national association of yōga painters in Japan, and he exhibited regularly at its annual exhibitions alongside Asai Chū, Yamamoto Hōsui, Goseda Yoshimatsu and other first-generation oil painters. His best-known canvas, The Heavenly Maiden in the Legend of Hagoromo (羽衣天女, 1890, Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art), takes its subject from the celebrated Noh play Hagoromo, in which the fisherman of Mio finds an angel's feathered robe hanging on a pine tree and persuades the angel to dance in exchange for its return. Honda's treatment combines a vaguely classicising European studio nude with Japanese narrative subject matter — an approach that anticipates the more famous Hagoromo treatments by Aoki Shigeru and others in the following generation.

From 1893, however, the return from Paris of Kuroda Seiki and Kume Keiichirō and their founding of the Tenshin Dōjō and, in 1896, the Hakubakai (White Horse Society) introduced a brighter, plein-air manner that quickly displaced the darker, Italianate Foreign-Office style in which Honda and most of the first generation had been trained. Honda continued to paint and to write — his Yōga Shinan (洋画指南, A Guide to Western-Style Painting, 1902) was a late attempt to systematise the technical instruction he had given for decades — and he remained a respected senior figure of the Meiji Bijutsukai and its successor the Pacific Painting Society (Taiheiyō Gakai, founded 1901). He was also active as a caricaturist for the satirical press of the late nineteenth century, and in his later years he practised landscape gardening as an amateur. He died in Tokyo on 26 May 1921.

Honda's surviving paintings are scattered across the Tokyo National Museum (which holds a number of his small studies, including the dated 1892 View of Prum Woods and Woman), the Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, the Fuchū Art Museum in Tokyo and private collections. His reputation today rests less on the painting than on his role as a transitional educator: the figure through whose textbooks, anatomy lectures and Shōgidō teaching the technical vocabulary of European oil painting was transmitted to the first generation of Japanese students for whom that vocabulary became a native idiom.