Komai Genki

Komai Genki (駒井源琦, 1747-1797), most commonly known by the single name Genki, was a Kyoto painter of the middle Edo period and one of the two most accomplished direct pupils of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795), the founder of the Maruyama school of naturalistic painting. He claimed descent from the ancient Minamoto (Genji) clan, and the choice of the art name 'Genki' (源琦, 'Gen-' being the Sinitic reading of Minamoto) reflects that family pretension. Within Ōkyo's atelier he is conventionally paired with Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-1799) as the master's two most gifted students, with Rosetsu prized for eccentric expressiveness and Genki for a more restrained, technically polished manner that hewed closely to Ōkyo's own.

Genki trained under Ōkyo from a young age and absorbed the school's signature combination of careful direct observation, soft graded ink wash (tsuketate), and a measured use of Western perspectival cues filtered through Chinese and Edo Japanese conventions. He became particularly identified with bijinga and Chinese-figure subjects — court ladies, classical Chinese beauties such as Yang Guifei, and scenes from the Tang and Song literary repertoire — rendered in fine line and a quiet, decorous palette. He also produced kachō-ga (bird-and-flower paintings), animal studies (a much-reproduced pair of rabbits is characteristic), and seasonal Kyoto landscapes in the Ōkyo manner. Surviving works are mostly hanging scrolls and album leaves in ink and color on silk or paper; his style is so close to Ōkyo's that he frequently collaborated with the master on large screen and scroll commissions, and attributions between the two can be difficult in the absence of clear signatures or seals.

Following Maruyama Ōkyo's death in 1795, Genki served for the remaining two years of his own life as the de facto administrator of the Maruyama school, a custodial role that placed him at the head of the atelier in succession to the founder. He died in 1797 at the age of fifty and was buried at Myōsen-ji in Kyoto. His position at the head of the school was short-lived because of his early death, and the long-term leadership of the broader Maruyama-Shijō tradition passed in practice to Matsumura Goshun and to Ōkyo's son Ōzui, but Genki's brief stewardship is recorded in the Edo painting biographies as evidence of the master's confidence in him.

Genki's relevance to the history of Japanese printmaking is indirect rather than direct. He was not a designer of single-sheet ukiyo-e prints in the manner of his Edo contemporaries Utamaro or Sharaku, and he predates the sōsaku-hanga creative-print movement by more than a century. His designs entered the print medium chiefly through two channels: late-Edo illustrated books (ehon) and haikai poetry anthologies (haisho), into which Kyoto publishers commissioned reductions of paintings by Maruyama-Shijō masters, and Meiji-period reproductive albums such as the 'Contest of Beauties from the Near and Distant Past' (Chūko shomeika bijin kurabe), in which Meiji woodblock cutters produced color-printed copies of earlier Maruyama-Shijō compositions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds one such Meiji leaf labelled 'After Genki (Komai Ki)', and Meiji haiku and gafu albums reproducing his work circulate occasionally in the Western trade. Original Edo-period printed materials directly designed by Genki himself, however, are not securely attested in the major museum print collections, and any holdings in his name should be examined carefully to determine whether the sheet is an autograph design, a contemporary book illustration, or a later Meiji reproductive copy.