Konoshima Ōkoku

Konoshima Ōkoku (木島桜谷, 1877-1938) was one of the leading nihonga painters of late Meiji and Taishō Kyoto, a celebrated specialist of animal subjects within the Maruyama-Shijō tradition, and an honored member of the Imperial Court Art Committee whose technical mastery and quiet introspection set him apart from the noisier currents of early twentieth-century Japanese painting. Trained under Imao Keinen — the great Meiji bird-and-flower painter and designer of the Keinen kachō gafu — Ōkoku absorbed the centuries-old Kyoto practice of sketching directly from living animals and plants, and he extended it into a body of work distinguished by close observation of deer, foxes, monkeys, eagles, lions, and the seasonal landscapes those creatures inhabit. Although the woodblock-print revival was largely a Tokyo phenomenon driven by the shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga movements, Ōkoku's reputation rested on his hanging-scroll and folding-screen paintings exhibited at the official Bunten and Teiten salons, where he repeatedly won the highest honors and where his name became synonymous with a particular kind of austere, atmospheric nihonga rooted in Kyoto's painting heritage.

Ōkoku was born in 1877 in Sanjō Aburanokōji, Kyoto, into a merchant family that operated a small business near the heart of the old capital. His given name was Bunjirō (文治郎). Showing artistic talent as a child, at the age of fifteen he was placed as a pupil under Imao Keinen (1845-1924), the senior Kyoto kachō-e painter who in 1880 had been appointed to the founding faculty of the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School and who by the 1890s was the most prestigious living exponent of the Maruyama-Shijō lineage that ran from Maruyama Ōkyo and Matsumura Goshun through Suzuki Hyakunen. In Keinen's atelier Ōkoku acquired the foundations of the Shijō practice: the discipline of shasei (sketching from life), the use of long diagonals and asymmetric placements against generous negative space, the careful handling of ink wash and graduated color, and the literary and seasonal vocabulary inherited from centuries of Japanese painting. Keinen gave him the art name Ōkoku (桜谷, "cherry blossom valley"), a name with characteristically Kyoto poetic resonance, and Ōkoku retained it throughout his career.

In parallel with his painting training Ōkoku pursued formal literary studies, completing the Chinese-classics curriculum at the Heian Kangaku-kan, a Kyoto academy specializing in the kanbun tradition. This grounding in classical Chinese literature and poetry would shape his work for the rest of his life: many of his most ambitious paintings draw their titles and subject matter from Tang and Song poetry, and his late landscape compositions in particular are inflected by the literati-painting tradition that Kyoto Shijō painters had absorbed into their own visual idiom. Ōkoku was also a serious zoological observer; following the example of his teacher Keinen, he kept extensive sketchbooks of the deer of Nara, the monkeys of Mount Hiei, and the foxes and small mammals he encountered on long walking trips through the mountains around Kyoto. He was known to visit the Nara Deer Park repeatedly to draw from life, and the deer in his mature paintings carry a precision of anatomical observation rare in twentieth-century Japanese painting.