Kawanabe Kyōsui

Kawanabe Kyōsui (河鍋暁翠, 1868-1935) was a Meiji- and Taishō-period Japanese painter and printmaker working at the meeting point of nihonga and ukiyo-e, the daughter and principal heir of the great Edo-and-Meiji master Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831-1889), and one of the first women in Japan to hold a senior teaching post in a chartered art school. Across a career that began in the Kyōsai studio in the last year of the Tokugawa shogunate and ended in the early years of the Shōwa era, she produced bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women), kachō-e (bird-and-flower) prints and paintings, history pictures, theatre scenes from nō and kyōgen, Buddhist devotional images, and battle prints, while also playing a pioneering role in the institutional education of women artists in modern Japan.

Kyōsui was born in Edo on the fourth day of the first month of Meiji 1 (4 January 1868), the daughter of Kawanabe Kyōsai, the celebrated painter, caricaturist, and printmaker who had trained in the Kanō school and in the Utagawa ukiyo-e workshop and who became one of the most prolific and idiosyncratic Japanese artists of the nineteenth century. Her artistic training began at home, reportedly from the age of five, in a workshop that was simultaneously a teaching atelier (Josiah Conder, the British architect of the Meiji modernization who became Kyōsai's foreign pupil from 1881, recorded the daily routine in his Paintings and Studies by Kawanabé Kyōsai of 1911). Kyōsui absorbed her father's eclectic combination of Kanō brushwork, Maruyama-Shijō observation, Utagawa figural design, and a satirical Edo-period sensibility, becoming so accomplished a copyist that some of her early works in Kyōsai's manner have proved difficult to distinguish from her father's own hand. By the age of seventeen she was exhibiting in her own right, and in Meiji 18 (1885) she was accepted into the second Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai (Domestic Painting Competitive Exhibition), one of the principal national painting venues organized under the Meiji art-establishment reforms.

With Kyōsai's death in 1889, Kyōsui took over a substantial share of the studio's commissioned work in her early twenties. The 1890s were her most public decade. In 1891 she contributed four interior-view prints depicting model flower arrangements to The Flowers of Japan and the Art of Floral Arrangement, the lavishly illustrated ikebana treatise by Josiah Conder (her father's pupil and the architect of much of Meiji Tokyo), published by Hakubunsha in Tokyo with the remaining ten color woodblock plates designed by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi — a project that placed Kyōsui at twenty-three in collaboration with the leading print designer of the previous generation. In 1894 she designed The Battle of Pungdo in Korea (朝鮮豊島沖海戦之図), a color triptych for the publisher Takegawa Seikichi (also given as Takeyama or Takekawa) depicting the first naval engagement of the First Sino-Japanese War, in which the Imperial Japanese Navy sank the British-flagged transport Kowshing; the work, now held by the British Library and other collections, is one of the relatively rare First Sino-Japanese War triptychs designed by a female artist. The same year she contributed a Poetry Contest (歌合) triptych showing court ladies engaged in formal waka composition — a virtuoso bijin-ga set demonstrating her command of Heian-revival historical costume and interior. Also in 1894 she joined Kajita Hankō, Kanō Tomonobu, Okakura Shūsui, and Eda Sadahiko in illustrating the Choix de fables de La Fontaine illustrées par un groupe des meilleurs artistes de Tōkyō, the celebrated French-language crêpe-paper edition of La Fontaine's fables edited by Pierre Barboutau and published in Tokyo by the Tsukiji press for Flammarion in Paris — a project that introduced her work to the European Japonisme market. Surimono with her signature, including a delicate 1895 print of pinks with a bow and arrow now in the British Museum (1980-1022-152), date from these same productive years.