Yamashita Shintarō

Yamashita Shintarō (山下新太郎, 1881-1966) was a Japanese yōga (Western-style) oil painter and one of the central organisational figures of the early twentieth-century Tokyo art world. Born on 29 August 1881 in Arakawa, Tokyo, into a family of picture framers, he received an early education that included English and Classical Chinese, an unusually broad linguistic preparation for an art student of his generation, and one that proved important to his later career as a translator of European painting culture into a Japanese institutional setting.

He entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, now Tokyo University of the Arts), studying yōga under two of the dominant figures of late Meiji Western-style painting, Kuroda Seiki and Fujishima Takeji, and graduated in 1904. The following year he travelled to Paris, where he trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in the ateliers of Raphaël Collin — the same teacher whose plein-air, classically tempered Naturalism had shaped Kuroda Seiki's mature manner — and Fernand Cormon. He extended his European study with a visit to Spain in 1907, where he copied works by Velázquez, and with travels through Switzerland and Italy in 1909. His paintings By the Window, Reading, and After Reading, all from his French period, were accepted at the Paris Salon between 1908 and 1909, and remain the defining works of his early career; they show the soft, luminous palette and refined figural construction that he absorbed from Collin and adapted to a quieter, more contemplative Japanese mode.

Returning to Tokyo in 1910, Yamashita immediately took a leading place in the official salon system, winning a third prize at the Bunten (Ministry of Education Fine Art Exhibition) in his first year back. In 1914, with Ishii Hakutei, Arishima Ikuma, Yamashita Kichi'emon, and others, he co-founded the Nikakai (Second Section Society), a breakaway exhibition group formed in opposition to what its members regarded as the conservative direction of the Bunten under government control. The founding of the Nikakai is one of the defining institutional events in the history of Japanese modernism, opening a parallel exhibition track for yōga and later avant-garde painting that ran alongside the official salon for the rest of the prewar period. Yamashita remained a Nikakai exhibitor until 1935, when he withdrew to join the Imperial Fine Arts Academy (Teikoku Bijutsu-in), and in 1936 he co-founded the Issuikai, a more academically inclined yōga society, again with Ishii Hakutei and the elder Yasui Sōtarō.

Alongside his exhibition career he was a prolific public-commission painter. In 1914-1915 he produced murals for the Chōsen Hotel in Keijō (Seoul), then under Japanese colonial administration; in 1927 he contributed a painting (Poetry Party at the Imperial Palace) to the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery (Seitoku Kinen Kaigakan) in Tokyo, the great cycle of large-format historical canvases commemorating the Meiji Emperor's reign. He held a teaching position at Bunka Gakuin from 1925 and was active as an art editor and translator of European art literature into Japanese. In 1931-1932 he returned to France, where he assisted in the restoration of Kanō-school screen paintings at the Musée Guimet in Paris, an episode that reflects the unusually close relationship he maintained with French cultural institutions throughout his career. He was decorated with the French Legion of Honour in 1932.

In 1941 a retrospective marked his sixtieth birthday. In the post-war reorganisation of the Japanese art world he was named a Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kōrōsha) in 1955 and received the Order of the Rising Sun in 1964. He died in Tokyo on 11 April 1966 at the age of eighty-four.

Yamashita's documented output is almost entirely in oil on canvas. Major works are held by the Artizon Museum (formerly the Bridgestone Museum of Art, which mounted a major exhibition of his work in 1956), the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), the Ishibashi Museum of Art in Kurume, the Senoku Hakukokan in Kyoto, the Hiroshima Museum of Art, the Geidai Museum at Tokyo University of the Arts, and the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery. Recurring subjects include intimate interior figure studies (Reading, After Reading, By the Window, Woman at her Shoes), nudes, family portraits (notably of his daughter Yuriko), and landscape subjects such as Wisteria in Nara Park and Garden of Kinkakuji Temple.

Within the broader picture of Japanese hanga, Yamashita Shintarō is not properly a printmaker. The master roster slug used in this project ('kanae-yamamoto-students-yamashita-shintaro') reflects an external classification — most likely from Merritt and Yamada's Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints (1995) or Newland's Hotei Encyclopedia of Japanese Woodblock Prints (2005) — that groups him biographically near the early sōsaku-hanga circle of Yamamoto Kanae, Ishii Hakutei, and Onchi Kōshirō through his Tokyo School of Fine Arts and Nikakai connections. The connection is real on the level of overlapping social and exhibition networks (Ishii Hakutei was both a founding sōsaku-hanga artist and Yamashita's Nikakai co-founder), but it does not translate into a personal print oeuvre. No body of woodblock prints by Yamashita is held in the major Western print-room collections that document early twentieth-century Japanese hanga — the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Library of Congress, or the Honolulu Museum of Art — and the Wikimedia Commons category of his works contains exclusively painting reproductions held by Japanese museums.

His significance for a history of modern Japanese visual culture lies in the institutional record: the breakaway founding of the Nikakai in 1914, the parallel teaching and public-commission work, the sustained Paris-Tokyo dialogue maintained through three trips to France, and the late co-founding of the Issuikai. He is, in short, a yōga painter whose biographical adjacency to the sōsaku-hanga movement is genuine but oblique, and whose contribution to the print medium itself, on the present documentary record, is not material.