Maruyama Ōkyo

Maruyama Ōkyo (円山応挙, 1733–1795) was the most influential painter working in Kyoto in the second half of the eighteenth century and the founder of the Maruyama school, whose program of close observation from life reshaped Japanese painting and provided the foundation for the broader Maruyama-Shijō tradition that dominated Kyoto practice into the twentieth century. Born Maruyama Iwajirō to a peasant family in the village of Anō in Tanba Province (now part of Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture) on June 12, 1733, he was given to a temple in Kyoto as a young boy and from there entered apprenticeship in the studio of Ishida Yūtei (1721–1786), a minor Kanō-school master with an active commercial workshop. Yūtei's training gave him the standard Kanō repertoire of brushwork, but the formative influences on his mature style lay elsewhere.

The young painter's first regular employment was in the Owariya, a Kyoto toy shop run by Nakajima Kanbei, where he designed megane-e (perspective pictures) and other prints to be viewed through nozoki-karakuri optical viewers — wooden cabinets fitted with biconvex lenses that produced an illusion of depth. Megane-e were the Japanese branch of a European fashion that had reached East Asia through Dutch and Chinese intermediaries; the genre forced Ōkyo to study Western single-point perspective in a way that no painter trained purely in the Kanō tradition would have done, and to translate that perspective into a domestic visual idiom. Surviving megane-e signed Iwasuke or Kawahisa (his early studio names) — including the Archery Contest at the Sanjūsangendō and the Maruyama interior scenes of around 1759 — show him constructing convincing perspectival depth in a Kyoto landscape vocabulary, often working from Chinese export prints of European originals as his models. He adopted the name Ōkyo (応挙, 'responding to the call', a reference to the painter Qian Xuan whose name shares one character) in the early 1760s and began signing his independent paintings with it.

The defining intellectual move of his career was the systematic adoption of shasei (写生, 'drawing from life') as the foundation of his practice. From the mid-1760s Ōkyo kept extensive sketchbooks of plants, insects, birds, mammals, and human figures observed directly, often in series of motion studies that captured an animal in successive postures. His patron Yūjō, abbot of the Enman'in monzeki in Ōtsu, gave him access to the temple's holdings of Chinese paintings, dead specimens for dissection, and the freedom to focus on shasei without market pressure, and the Enman'in years (mid-1760s through 1770s) produced the master sketchbooks (including the famous Insect and Plant Studies scrolls now divided among Japanese institutions) that became school study materials. His mature paintings combined this shasei foundation with a sophisticated handling of Chinese ink painting conventions, Korean Joseon-period naturalism, and the residual Kanō decorative vocabulary inherited from Yūtei. Two of the most famous late commissions — the Pine Trees in Snow screens (1786, designated National Treasure) for the Mitsui family and the Daijō-ji temple complex's painting program (1787) — show him deploying this fusion at full scale.

The school Ōkyo gathered around himself in Kyoto was the single most consequential painting workshop of late-eighteenth-century Japan. His immediate pupils included Komai Genki, Yamaguchi Soken, Watanabe Nangaku, Mori Tetsuzan, his sons Maruyama Ōzui and Ōjō, and Nagasawa Rosetsu, who would emerge as the school's most eccentric talent. Through Matsumura Goshun, who studied under Ōkyo after the death of his first teacher Yosa Buson in 1783 and went on to found the parallel Shijō school, the Maruyama lineage merged with the Buson-derived literati tradition to produce the hybrid Maruyama-Shijō movement that would dominate Kyoto painting for the next 150 years. Through Goshun's pupils and their pupils — Matsumura Keibun, Shibata Gitō, Yokoyama Seiki, Kōno Bairei, Takeuchi Seihō, Yamamoto Shunkyo, Uemura Shōen — Ōkyo's shasei program would shape the Meiji nihonga reformation and provide the technical foundation for early-twentieth-century Kyoto naturalism. He died in Kyoto on August 31, 1795.

Woodblock prints occupy a distinctive but minor place in Ōkyo's output. The early megane-e of c. 1759 to the mid-1760s — designed for the optical viewer market and produced in small runs as commercial prints — are the only true ukiyo-e-style prints he made in his lifetime, and survive in modest numbers in collections at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and the Kobe City Museum. The much larger printed presence is posthumous: throughout the Meiji and Taishō periods, Kyoto publishers (Yamada Naosaburō, Unsōdō, and others) issued woodblock-printed picture books and album sets reproducing his brush sketches as study materials and as collectible reference works. The Ōkyo gafu (1850) and Okyo shubi gafu (1892) are the two best-known of these, each running multiple editions and circulating widely in nineteenth-century painting schools. These reproduction prints were the principal vehicle through which Ōkyo's animal, plant, and figural designs reached subsequent generations of Japanese painters, and they remain the form in which most Ōkyo work survives in Western museum print collections today.