Maruyama Banka

Maruyama Banka (丸山晩霞, 1867-1942) was one of the leading Japanese watercolor painters of the late Meiji and early Shōwa periods, best known for his luminous mountain landscapes and his central role in organising the watercolor movement in Japan. Born on 5 June 1867 in Nezu village, Shinano Province (present-day Tōmi City, Nagano Prefecture), he came of age in the mountainous country that would later furnish the principal subject matter of his art. His birth name was Kensaku (健作); "Banka" (literally "evening haze" or "evening mist") was the artistic name he adopted in maturity, evocative of the atmospheric landscape painting on which his reputation rests.

Maruyama's earliest training was in the literati tradition. As a youth he studied Nanga (Southern School) painting under Kodama Katei, learning the brush idioms of Chinese-derived ink landscape that still dominated regional painting practice in central Japan during the 1880s. At seventeen, however, he resolved to become a Western-style painter and travelled to Tokyo, where he enrolled at the Kanga Gakusha to study oil painting and later studied at the Shōgidō academy directed by Honda Kinkichirō. The Shōgidō at this period was a meeting ground for many of the figures who would shape early Meiji yōga, and Maruyama overlapped there with Asai Chū, while Ogawa Usen studied at the same school — a network of contacts that would prove decisive for his later organisational activity.

The encounter that set the course of his career came in 1893, when Maruyama met the young Yoshida Hiroshi in Numata, Gunma Prefecture. Yoshida was at that time developing the detailed, observational watercolor technique that would later make him one of the most internationally recognised Japanese watercolorists, and the meeting persuaded Maruyama that watercolor — rather than oil — was the medium best suited to his temperament and to the depiction of Japanese mountain scenery. In 1900 Maruyama travelled to the United States together with Mitsutani Kunishirō, Kanokogi Takeshirō, and Kawai Shinzō, exhibiting paintings in Boston and Washington, D.C. He then continued on to Europe before returning to Japan alone in 1901; these American exhibitions are now recognised as one of the earliest concerted attempts to introduce Japanese watercolor painting to the West.

Back in Japan, Maruyama settled into a career that combined three roles: that of painter, of teacher to younger watercolorists, and of organiser and publicist for the medium. He was a founding participant in the Taiheiyō Gakai (Pacific Painting Society), formed in 1902 by Western-style painters in the wake of the Meiji Bijutsukai, which became one of the principal exhibition venues for yōga outside the official Bunten salon; at the invitation of Ōshita Tōjirō he moved to Tokyo around 1903 and taught younger painters at its training institute. In 1913 he helped found the Nihon Suisaiga-kai (Japan Watercolor Painting Society), which gave the watercolor movement its first dedicated national exhibition society, and he was active in the teaching studios that grew up around it. His writings appeared throughout the influential watercolor magazine Mizue, which had been founded in 1905 by Ōshita Tōjirō and quickly became the central publication of the Japanese watercolor movement; by the early 1910s Maruyama was a regular contributor and at moments an editor, and his criticism and practical advice in its pages shaped the medium's reception for a generation of younger painters.

Maruyama's mature subject matter centred on the Japanese Alps and the high country of his native Shinshū, which he painted with a watercolorist's attention to weather, atmosphere, and seasonal change, building compositions on the bones of his early Nanga training while applying the wet-into-wet wash techniques he had absorbed from Yoshida and from English and American watercolor models. He also painted in cities and travelled extensively. A second European journey in 1911 produced 258 works, which were shown together at Tokyo's Imperial Hotel and consolidated his standing as a senior figure of the watercolor school. Later travels took him to Korea in 1917 and to China in 1923, as well as through Southeast Asia and India, and contributed both landscape and architectural subjects to his portfolio. Even so, the alpine and pastoral scenes of central Japan remained the work for which he is best known.

Maruyama Banka died on 4 March 1942 in his native Nezu. He is commemorated locally by the Maruyama Banka Memorial Museum (丸山晩霞記念館) in Tōmi City, Nagano Prefecture, which preserves a substantial collection of his watercolors and oils. His historical importance is twofold. As a painter, he is one of the great chroniclers of the Japanese mountains in the watercolor medium, ranking with such contemporaries as Ōshita Tōjirō and Miyake Kokki among the leading Meiji-Taishō watercolorists. As an organiser, he was central to the institutional infrastructure — exhibition societies, watercolor schools, the magazine Mizue — that allowed watercolor to flourish in Japan as something more than an imported European technique. His work is held in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and other public collections, though his international profile remains modest relative to that of his friend Yoshida Hiroshi, and serious recognition of his contribution outside Japan is only slowly emerging.