Matsumoto Fūko

Matsumoto Fūko (松本楓湖, 1840–1923) was one of the central historical-narrative painters (rekishiga) of the Meiji period and a founding member of the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute), the institutional home of modern nihonga established by Okakura Tenshin in 1898. The pupil of Kikuchi Yōsai, the great early-modern revivalist of the historical-portrait genre, Fūko inherited and extended Yōsai's project of imagining the Japanese past — the Heian court, the Genpei War, the Mongol invasions of Kamakura, the Sengoku battlefields — in disciplined ink-and-colour painting suited to the new public Japan that was emerging after the Restoration. His workshop in Asakusa was for four decades the leading atelier of historical painting in Tokyo, and the long roll of students he trained there — Imamura Shikō, Hayami Gyoshū, Kobayashi Kokei, Yasuda Yukihiko, Maeda Seison — became the founding figures of the second generation of nihonga and of the Bijutsuin's interwar revival under Yokoyama Taikan. Fūko himself lived through the entire arc of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japanese painting, from his apprenticeship in late-Edo Edo to his service as an elder statesman of the Bunten (Ministry of Education Art Exhibition) jury in the Taishō period, and his career is one of the principal threads through which the indigenous painting tradition was carried across the discontinuity of 1868.

Fūko was born Matsumoto Sannojō (松本三之助) on 23 October 1840 in Anekōji, a village on the Tone river in Hitachi Province (present-day Ishioka, Ibaraki Prefecture). His family were rural farmers of modest means, and there was nothing in his childhood circumstances to suggest a career as a court-recognised painter; his early aptitude for drawing was noticed by a local schoolmaster, and at the age of fifteen he was sent up to Edo to study under Sasaki Sōtai, a minor Kanō-school painter then working in the city. The decisive turn in his training came shortly afterwards, when at sixteen or seventeen he entered the studio of Kikuchi Yōsai (菊池容斎, 1788–1878), the senior figure who had effectively revived the indigenous historical-narrative tradition in early-nineteenth-century Japan. Yōsai's monumental woodblock-printed album Zenken kojitsu (前賢故実, "True Facts about Former Worthies," twenty volumes, 1843–1868) — a survey in five hundred plates of the great heroes and heroines of Japanese history from the mythological emperors to the early Tokugawa — had given Meiji-era Japan a coherent canon of national figures suitable for visual treatment, and Fūko absorbed both Yōsai's iconographic apparatus and his disciplined, line-led drawing manner. He took the studio name Fūko (楓湖, "maple lake") from the small lake at his birthplace in Hitachi, and through the 1860s worked in Yōsai's atelier alongside the senior pupil Watanabe Shōtei.

The collapse of the shogunate in 1868 and the consequent dissolution of the great Edo patronage system devastated the indigenous schools and threw most Kanō and Tosa painters into poverty during the 1870s. Fūko was thirty-eight at the time of Yōsai's death in 1878 and inherited from his master a complete iconographic programme but, like the rest of his generation, almost no patronage. The first major commission of his career — and the one that secured his place in the rekishiga tradition — came from Erin-ji (恵林寺), the great Rinzai temple in Yamanashi that was the family mortuary of Takeda Shingen. Between 1871 and 1873 Fūko produced for Erin-ji a set of twenty-four hanging scrolls depicting the Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen (武田二十四将), the celebrated band of warriors who had served the Kai-province daimyō through the Sengoku wars. The series, now housed in the Takeda Shingen Museum, made Fūko's reputation as a painter of historical warriors: each general is set in ink-and-light-colour in the manner Yōsai had codified, identified by name and family crest, and a number of the portraits — most famously that of Itagaki Nobukata, dated 1860 with an inscription added in 1872 by Itagaki Taisuke (the Meiji liberal politician who claimed descent from the Sengoku general) — became standard reference images for the Takeda iconography in modern Japan. The Erin-ji series is the foundational document of Fūko's career and the basis on which most later commissions were extended.