Kanō Hōgai

Kanō Hōgai (狩野芳崖, 1828-1888) was the last great master of the Kanō school and, alongside his fellow apprentice Hashimoto Gahō, the central painter of the founding generation of modern nihonga. Working with the American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa and the critic Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin) in the 1880s, Hōgai produced a small body of mature paintings — Hibo Kannon (Avalokiteśvara as a Merciful Mother), the Niō Seizing an Evil Spirit, Two Dragons in Clouds, Eagles, Lions — that defined what "Japanese-style painting" would mean after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. He died at sixty in 1888, only weeks before the opening of the school he had helped Fenollosa and Okakura design, but his synthesis of Kanō brushwork with Western perspective and atmospheric shading became the founding visual language of nihonga and was carried forward by his students and by Gahō's pupils at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō.

Hōgai was born Kanō Shōnosuke in 1828 in Chōfu, the castle town of the Chōfu domain of the Mōri clan in Nagato Province (modern Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture). His father Kanō Seikō was a Kanō-school painter in the service of the Chōfu domain, and the young Shōnosuke was trained in the family workshop from childhood. In 1846, at eighteen, he was sent to Edo to apprentice in the Kobikichō Kanō atelier of Kanō Shōsen'in Tadanobu, the head of one of the four main Edo Kanō houses. There he met Hashimoto Gahō, seven years his junior, who was beginning his apprenticeship in the same studio; the two became lifelong friends and would together carry the Kanō tradition across the discontinuity of the Restoration. Hōgai absorbed the complete Kanō repertoire — ink landscapes after Sesshū and the Chinese Song and Ming masters, Buddhist and Daoist figural subjects, the dragon-and-tiger imagery long associated with the Kanō school, and the painted screens and sliding doors that decorated shogunal and daimyō residences. By the early 1860s he was producing finished works for the Kobikichō studio under the brush name Shōrin and had begun to receive commissions in his own right.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 destroyed the patronage system that had supported the Kanō school for three centuries. The shogunate fell, the daimyō domains were abolished in 1871, and Buddhist temples — major Kanō patrons — were stripped of their land and income in the haibutsu kishaku anti-Buddhist movement. Hōgai, like Gahō, fell into severe poverty during the 1870s. He returned briefly to Chōfu, then moved back to Tokyo, taking work where he could find it: painting fans, supplying designs for ceramic decoration at a small Tokyo workshop, briefly attempting to run a stationery shop, and undertaking miscellaneous commercial commissions. The fashion for Western-style painting (yōga) under Italian instructors at the new Industrial Art School left painters of the old schools without students, without patronage, and largely without an audience.

The decisive turn in Hōgai's career came in 1882, when he was discovered by Ernest Fenollosa, an American philosopher who had arrived in Japan in 1878 to teach at Tokyo Imperial University and had quickly become the most articulate advocate of "Japanese-style painting" as a national resource. Fenollosa, working with his young Japanese student Okakura Kakuzō, was assembling a circle of Kanō and Tosa painters who could be persuaded to develop a modern idiom for traditional Japanese painting. He recognised in Hōgai the senior surviving Kanō master and, despite their differences in language and culture, the two formed an extraordinarily close working partnership during the last six years of Hōgai's life. Fenollosa commissioned paintings, organised exhibitions, paid Hōgai a stipend, and, in 1884, helped him win a prize at the second Domestic Painting Competition (Kangakai) for his Niō Seizing an Evil Spirit — the first major public recognition of the new style.