Kobori Tomone

Kobori Tomone (小堀鞆音, 1864-1931) was the founding modern master of rekishi-ga, the historical-narrative branch of nihonga that took as its subjects the great episodes of Japanese history — from the Nara court and the Heian aristocracy through the Genpei War and the Meiji Restoration. Working in the Tosa-yamato-e tradition refined by Yamato-e and Kanō study, he became Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō professor in 1897, a founding member of the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) in 1919, and was appointed Imperial Household Artist (Teishitsu Gigeiin) in 1917, serving in that capacity until his death. He is best known today for the great wall paintings he contributed to the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery (Seitoku Kinen Kaigakan) at the Meiji Jingū Gaien — the cycle of eighty large-format paintings completed between 1926 and 1936 that depicts the major events of the reign of the Emperor Meiji — and for the kuchi-e (frontispiece) woodblock prints he designed for the literary magazine Bungei Kurabu and other Meiji periodicals between roughly 1898 and 1912. His students at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts included Yasuda Yukihiko, Imamura Shikō, and Maeda Seison, three of the central figures of twentieth-century nihonga, and his teaching helped shape the historical-painting wing of the second-generation Nihon Bijutsuin.

Tomone was born on March 26, 1864, in the village of Konaka in Hatagawa Mura, Aso District, Shimotsuke Province — the area now incorporated into the city of Sano in Tochigi Prefecture, a region whose long memory of medieval warrior houses (the Sano, the Ashikaga) would later furnish much of his subject matter. His birth name was Kobori Sōgorō (蘇五郎), changed in adulthood to the artist name Tomone (鞆音, "the sound of the archery glove"), with reference both to the tomo armguard worn by mounted archers and to the artist's own lifelong interest in the equipment and ceremonies of medieval bushi. He came from a family with modest samurai ties to the Sano domain, and in 1881, at seventeen, he travelled to Tokyo to study painting under Kawabe Mitate (川辺御楯, 1838-1905), a Tosa-school painter and one of the leading specialists in historical and yamato-e subjects in early-Meiji Tokyo. Under Mitate, Tomone was trained in the technical foundations of yamato-e — the colour palette, the figural conventions, the iconography of court costume and military dress — and absorbed the antiquarian discipline that would characterise his mature work.

The 1880s and 1890s were a period of fundamental institutional reorganisation for Japanese painting. The patronage system that had supported the Kanō and Tosa schools through the Edo period had collapsed with the abolition of the domains in 1871; the new Meiji state, under the influence of Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin), was assembling a new framework — the Kangakai (Painting Appreciation Society) from 1884, the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo School of Fine Arts) from 1887, and the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute) from 1898 — in which painters trained in the old schools were expected to develop a modern "Japanese-style painting" (nihonga) as a national art form. Tomone, working in the Tosa-yamato-e idiom, exhibited at the Kangakai's competitions from the mid-1880s and was recognised by Okakura as the leading representative of historical-narrative painting in his generation. In 1897 he was appointed professor of historical painting (rekishi-ga) at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō, and in 1898, when Okakura's faction broke away to found the Nihon Bijutsuin, Tomone followed and was photographed among the twenty-one founding members at Yanaka — alongside Yokoyama Taikan, Hishida Shunsō, Shimomura Kanzan, and Hashimoto Gahō.