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, one of the central painters 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, and other late works — that helped define what "Japanese-style painting" would mean after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. He died at sixty in 1888, just months before the opening of the school he had helped Fenollosa and Okakura envision, but his synthesis of Kanō brushwork with Western perspective and atmospheric shading became a 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 Kōtarō 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 Kōtarō was trained in the family workshop from childhood. In 1846, at eighteen, he was sent to Edo to apprentice in the Kobikichō Kanō atelier, where he studied under 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 training 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 art name Shōrin.

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, taking whatever work he could find — from selling writing instruments to miscellaneous commercial commissions — as the old schools were left without students, patronage, or an audience amid the new fashion for Western-style painting (yōga).

The decisive turn in Hōgai's career came in the early 1880s, 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 over the final years of Hōgai's life the two formed an extraordinarily close working partnership. Fenollosa commissioned paintings, organised exhibitions, and supported him financially; through the Kangakai (Painting Appreciation Society) that Fenollosa and Okakura founded in 1884, Hōgai's work — including the Niō Seizing an Evil Spirit — gained its first major public recognition in the new style.

The paintings of Hōgai's final years are among the founding documents of nihonga. Hibo Kannon (Avalokiteśvara as a Merciful Mother) — a tall, narrow hanging scroll of a bodhisattva drawing forth a haloed infant from a sphere of light above a misty mountain landscape — absorbs Western anatomical drawing, atmospheric perspective, and the radiant lighting of nineteenth-century European religious painting into a fundamentally Buddhist iconographic structure. Fenollosa, who acquired the 1883 version (now at the Freer Gallery of Art), regarded it as one of the most important paintings of the modern Japanese era; Hōgai completed a final version only days before his death in November 1888. Other late works apply the same synthesis to the standard Kanō subjects of dragons, raptors, and Buddhist guardians, and are today held in major collections including the Freer Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (largely through the Fenollosa-Weld Collection), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Two Dragons in Clouds), and the Tokyo University of the Arts.

Fenollosa, Okakura, and Hōgai looked toward the institutional revival of Japanese-style painting that would culminate in the opening of the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo School of Fine Arts, today the Tokyo University of the Arts) in 1889. Hōgai had been expected to be a leading figure in its teaching of Japanese-style painting, but he died in Tokyo on November 5, 1888, at the age of sixty, three months before the school opened; Hashimoto Gahō took up the role in his place. Hōgai's small body of mature work entered the Freer Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tokyo University of the Arts, and other major collections, becoming a foundational corpus for the study of early Meiji nihonga. The line he opened from the Kanō tradition into modern Japanese painting — carried forward by Gahō and the first generation of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts — remains a defining episode in the history of nineteenth-century Japanese art.