Kawakami Tōgai

Kawakami Tōgai (川上冬崖, 1827–1881) was a pioneering figure of Meiji-era yōga (Western-style painting) and the most important transitional teacher between late-Edo nanga ink painting and the systematic study of European oil, watercolour and academic perspective in early modern Japan. His pupils Takahashi Yuichi, Koyama Shōtarō and Matsuoka Hisashi became the founding generation of professional Western-style painters in Japan, and the textbooks and copybooks Tōgai produced in the 1860s and 1870s functioned as the first sustained body of yōga pedagogy in the language. He stands at the very head of any history of modern Japanese painting, even though his own oeuvre — owing to the destruction of much of it and to the small number of works that ever circulated outside Japan — is barely known in Western collections today.

He was born in the third month of Bunsei 10 (1827) in the Shinano village of Matsushiro, in present-day Nagano prefecture, under the birth name Yamagishi Mannojō. As a boy of unusual aptitude he was adopted into the Kawakami family, a household of minor samurai rank attached to the Sanada domain, and his childhood education proceeded through the usual programme of the late-Edo provincial bushi: Chinese classics, calligraphy, and instruction in painting under Ōnishi Chinnen (1792–1851), a leading practitioner of the urbane Shijō manner who had himself studied under Tani Bunchō. Tōgai's mature ink landscapes preserve a clear Shijō and nanga (literati) substratum throughout his life: even his most ambitious experiments in Western-style technique are recognisably the work of a painter trained in the Bunjin tradition of suggestive brushwork and small-scale lyric landscape.

In the early 1860s the Tokugawa shogunate, alarmed by the steady pressure of foreign powers and determined to absorb whatever Western technical knowledge was available, established the Bansho Shirabesho (Institute for the Investigation of Barbarian Books), an administrative bureau in Edo dedicated to translation, scientific instruction and the assimilation of European technology. In 1861 Tōgai was appointed to the newly created Painting Section (gagaku-kyoku) of the institute, where his task was to translate Dutch-language treatises on perspective, light, anatomy and oil technique and to teach what could be reconstructed from their plates. He worked there alongside Takahashi Yuichi, whom he soon recognised as his most talented student and whom he sent to study under the British painter Charles Wirgman in Yokohama. The Bansho Shirabesho — which evolved into the Kaiseijo and ultimately, after the Meiji Restoration, the University of Tokyo — was thus the first institution in Japan to teach Western painting as a discipline, and Tōgai was its principal painting instructor.

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Tōgai continued in government service. He worked at the Tokyo Daigakkō, was attached at various points to the Ministry of Education and to the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff (Sanbō Honbu), and produced a great quantity of technical, cartographic and topographical drawings for the new state. Around 1869 he opened a private painting school, the Chōkō-dō (聴香読画館), in the Shitaya district of Tokyo, which trained a further generation of yōga pupils — most prominently Koyama Shōtarō and Asai Chū's teacher Matsuoka Hisashi — and through which Tōgai exercised arguably the deepest single influence on the first generation of Japanese Western-style painters. He also published the Seiga Shinan (西画指南, c. 1871), the first vernacular Japanese textbook on Western painting, derived from a Dutch source, which was used in the official school curriculum for several years.

Tōgai's own painting practice in the 1870s was unusually heterogeneous. His Western-style works — watercolour landscapes, copies after European masters circulated in print, occasional small oil portraits and studies of historical or military subjects — survive in modest numbers, often in regional museums in his native Shinano. Alongside these he continued to produce nanga ink paintings on paper and silk; many later critics, including the Meiji-era historian Hayashi Tadamasa, judged these the most consistently successful of his works. Two streams thus run through the small surviving corpus: ambitious Western experiments — watercolour copies after Paul Delaroche, the unfinished studies of Napoleon — and meditative literati landscapes in ink in which the discipline of Bunchō and Chinnen is fully internalised.

In the late summer of 1881 a scandal broke at the Army General Staff over a misappropriation in the preparation of a large topographical map of the home islands. Tōgai, then in his fifty-fifth year and responsible for the painting and engraving staff of the bureau, took on the burden of the bureaucratic failure. He travelled to the hot-spring town of Atami on the Sagami coast and committed suicide there in October 1881, a death that shocked the Tokyo art world and brought to a premature end the career of the most important teacher of his generation. His grave and a small stele are preserved at Yanaka cemetery in Tokyo, and there is a permanent memorial display in the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum, which holds the largest single collection of his work. The succeeding generation — Takahashi Yuichi above all, but also Koyama Shōtarō, Matsuoka Hisashi, and through them Asai Chū, Kuroda Seiki and the entire Hakubakai school — built the institutional foundations of modern Japanese painting on the soil that Tōgai had cleared.