Kōno Bairei

Kōno Bairei (幸野楳嶺, 1844-1895) was the dominant figure of Kyoto painting in the second half of the nineteenth century and the most influential teacher of the generation that founded modern Japanese painting (nihonga) in the Kansai region. Born Kōno Naotoyo in Kyoto in 1844, the son of a confectioner, he was apprenticed in childhood to Nakajima Raishō of the Maruyama school descending from Maruyama Ōkyo. After Raishō's death he continued his training with Shiokawa Bunrin of the closely related Shijō school. By the early 1870s Bairei had emerged as the principal heir of the joint Maruyama-Shijō tradition, the synthesis that defined refined Kyoto painting from the late Edo period into the Meiji.

Bairei's career unfolded against the crisis the Meiji Restoration created for Kyoto and its painters. The transfer of the imperial court to Tokyo in 1869, the dissolution of daimyō households and Buddhist temple patronage networks, and the modernizing reforms of the new government threatened the institutional base on which Kyoto's painters depended. He responded by becoming an organizer of his profession. In 1878 he co-founded the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyōto-fu Gagakkō), the first government-supported art school in Japan. He later established his own atelier, which became the city's most important teaching studio of the late 1880s and 1890s. His students read as a roster of early Kyoto nihonga: Takeuchi Seihō, Imao Keinen, Kikuchi Hōbun, Tsuji Kakō, and Yamamoto Shunkyo. Through them Bairei shaped twentieth-century Kyoto painting for two generations after his death.

As a designer of woodblock-printed books, Bairei achieved popularity exceeding his standing as a painter on silk. His three-volume Bairei hyakuchō gafu (Album of One Hundred Birds, 1881) became one of the most widely reproduced kachō-e books of the Meiji period; a three-volume continuation followed in 1884. The related Bairei kachō gafu (Album of Flowers and Birds, 1883) paired birds with seasonal plants across the year, and Bairei kiku hyakushu (One Hundred Varieties of Chrysanthemum, 1891-96) extended the formula to a single flower. In the prints birds, fish, insects, and flowers are observed with the close attention Ōkyo and his successors practiced on screens and hanging scrolls, but rendered in the flatter palette of color woodblock. The books reached Western collections in the 1880s and 1890s and were one of the principal channels through which European artists absorbed Japanese natural-history imagery during the Japonisme movement.

In the 1880s and 1890s Bairei occupied official positions near the centre of the Meiji state's program for reforming Japanese painting. He served as a judge at the Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai exhibitions in Tokyo and at Kyoto exhibitions of the Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai, and in 1893 he was appointed to the Art Committee of the Imperial Household. His position was that the Maruyama-Shijō lineage, refined by attention to nature, could serve as the basis of a modern national style without recourse to Western oil painting.

Bairei died in Kyoto on 2 February 1895 at the age of fifty. His paintings are held by the Kyoto and Tokyo National Museums and major Western collections; his printed books are present in nearly every significant Japanese print collection, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art. Through Takeuchi Seihō and the Kyoto pupils he trained his influence ran into the founding generation of nihonga; through his bird-and-flower books, into Japonisme and the natural-history tradition that produced shin-hanga and shin-kachōga. He stands as the bridge between Edo-period Kyoto painting and the modern Japanese tradition that succeeded it.