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 given name was Kunizō (国造); '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 Kaiga Gakusha (Painting Academy) to study oil painting and then transferred to 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 and Ogawa Usen among others — 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, at the age of twenty-eight, 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. The friendship that grew out of that meeting was unusually consequential. In 1899 the two artists travelled together to the United States, departing in 1900 alongside Mitsutani Kunishirō, Kanokogi Takeshirō, and Kawai Shinzō, and exhibited paintings in Boston, Washington, D.C., and other American cities. Yoshida and Maruyama then continued on to Europe before Maruyama returned to Japan in 1901; the American exhibitions are now recognised as one of the earliest concerted attempts to introduce Japanese watercolor painting to the West.

Returning to Tokyo in 1903, 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 member of the Taiheiyō Gakai (Pacific Painting Society), established in 1902 from the merger of the Meiji Bijutsukai and other yōga circles, which became one of the principal exhibition venues for Western-style painting outside the official Bunten salon. In 1913 he co-founded the Nihon Suisaiga-kai (Japan Watercolor Painting Society) together with Ōshita Tōjirō, Ishii Hakutei, Yoshida Hiroshi, Miyake Kokki, and other watercolorists, providing the watercolor movement with its first dedicated national exhibition society. He also helped establish the Nihon Suisaiga Kenkyūsho (Japan Watercolor Research Institute) and the Shin-Nihonga Kyōkai (New Japanese Painting Association). 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 an entire generation of younger painters.

Maruyama's mature subject matter centred on the Japanese Alps and the high country of his native Shinshū. He painted Hakuba, Tateyama, the Kiso valley, and the foothills around his birthplace 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 through East Asia, including China, Korea, and Taiwan, and contributed both landscape and architectural subjects — bridges in Paris, churches in provincial France, ruined castles — 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 in Tokyo on 4 March 1942 at the age of seventy-four. He is now 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 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. Although his work is held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other public collections, his international profile remains modest relative to that of his lifelong friend Yoshida Hiroshi, and serious recognition of his contribution outside Japan is only now slowly emerging.