Kobayashi Eitaku

Kobayashi Eitaku (小林永濯, 1843-1890) was a Meiji-era eclectic painter and print designer whose career bridged the dying world of late-Edo Kano-school orthodoxy and the febrile, cross-cultural visual culture of early-Meiji Tokyo. Born in Edo in 1843, the final decade of the Tokugawa shogunate, he was apprenticed to Kano Eishin (Kano Tōshun Eishin) of the Surugadai branch of the Kano school, the dominant lineage of officially sponsored painting under the shogunate. His training in the Kano workshop instilled a thorough command of the brushwork conventions, compositional schemata, and Chinese-derived ink-painting vocabulary that the Kano academy had codified across the Edo period: birds and flowers, landscapes in the kanga (Chinese-style) manner, narrative figure subjects from Buddhist and Confucian iconography, and historical and mythological themes drawn from Chinese and Japanese classical literature.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 abruptly removed the shogunal patronage on which the Kano school had depended for centuries, throwing trained Kano painters into a transformed market in which they had to find new audiences. Kobayashi Eitaku adapted with unusual energy and breadth. He took the name Eitaku (also written 'Sensai Eitaku' in some signatures, a name carrying the connotation of refined or polished talent) and built a hybrid practice that drew on his Kano training while ranging freely across ukiyo-e print design, painting for the popular market, book illustration, and commercial design work. The breadth of his output, which crosses genre, historical narrative, myth, religion, and design pattern books, distinguishes him from artists trained in a single mode and gives his career a characteristically Meiji eclectic shape.

Kobayashi Eitaku is best remembered today for two strands of work. The first is his collaboration with the American zoologist and Japonologist Edward Sylvester Morse, who taught at the Imperial University in Tokyo from 1877 and became one of the most influential Western interpreters of Japanese material culture. Eitaku supplied illustrations for Morse's American publications, most notably 'Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings' (1886), in which precisely observed line drawings of Japanese domestic architecture, furniture, gardens, and everyday objects accompanied Morse's text. The collaboration places Eitaku within the small but consequential group of Meiji artists whose work reached an American audience directly and helped form the late-nineteenth-century Western image of Japan. The second strand is his Tokyo-published woodblock prints and illustrated books, including ambitious multi-volume design pattern books that gathered hundreds of motifs from nature, classical literature, mythology, and contemporary life into a single reference compendium for craftsmen and designers.

His 'Album of Universal Designs by Eitaku' (Sensai Eitaku senga banbutsu hinagata gafu, 1880), held in multiple volumes by the Victoria and Albert Museum and other Western collections, is the great surviving example of this design-book practice. The five-volume work is a visual encyclopedia of decorative and figural motifs, ranging from auspicious symbols and seasonal flowers to historical and mythological figures, executed in a precise, slightly Westernized line that reflects Eitaku's exposure to imported European drawing conventions. The book served Meiji artisans, lacquerers, metalworkers, ceramicists, and textile designers who needed a portable reference for the visual vocabulary on which Japanese export crafts would draw during the late-nineteenth-century vogue for Japonisme.