Mochizuki Gyokusen

Mochizuki Gyokusen (1834-1913) was one of the leading Kyoto nihonga painters of the Meiji period, the second-generation head of the Mochizuki school of painters, an official artist of the Imperial Household, and one of the founding teachers of the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School. His career spans the closing years of the Edo period, the upheavals of the Meiji Restoration, and the institutionalisation of Japanese painting in the Imperial Academy system. Working largely in the inherited vocabulary of the Maruyama-Shijō and Kanō traditions but with an increasingly observational sensibility, Gyokusen produced landscapes, bird-and-flower paintings, animal studies, and figural compositions for both temple and court patrons, and circulated his designs widely through the woodblock-printed painting manuals that established the technical canon of Meiji Kyoto painting.

Gyokusen was born in Kyoto in 1834 (Tenpō 5) as the son of Mochizuki Gyokusen the First (1794-1852), a Shijō-trained Kyoto painter who had himself taken the Gyokusen name from his teacher Yokoyama Kazan. The younger Gyokusen's given name was Shigemine (重峯), and he later used the studio names Sairei (栖嶺) and Shumei (秋溟) alongside the Gyokusen art name (玉泉). He began his training in his father's studio, absorbing the Shijō-school discipline of shasei (sketching from life) and the Maruyama-Shijō repertoire of birds, plants, animals, and landscapes. When his father died in 1852, Gyokusen — barely eighteen years old — became head of the Mochizuki school, an unusually early succession that reflected both the painter's precocity and the pressure on hereditary Kyoto painting houses to maintain their position in the late Bakumatsu art world.

In 1855 Gyokusen was commissioned, alongside other senior Kyoto painters, to contribute to the painted decorations of the reconstructed Kyoto Imperial Palace following the fires that had destroyed parts of the complex in the preceding decade. The Imperial Palace project gave him an early association with court patronage and a place among the painters trusted with the most prestigious public commissions in the city. He continued through the 1860s and 1870s to work in the manner of his Shijō inheritance while gradually responding to the new pressures of the Meiji period: the dismantling of feudal patronage, the rise of yōga (Western-style painting), the institutional consolidation of Tokyo as the political and increasingly the cultural capital, and the simultaneous Kyoto effort to defend traditional painting through new schools and exhibition societies.

In 1880 Gyokusen was a founding member of the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyōto Furitsu Gagakkō), the first municipally chartered painting school in Japan and the institutional vehicle through which Kyoto painters such as Kōno Bairei, Imao Keinen, and Suzuki Hyakunen sought to systematise the training of the next generation of nihonga artists. Gyokusen taught the Kano and Shijō traditions at the school during its formative years, and his role places him among the architects of the Kyoto painting establishment of the late nineteenth century. He exhibited regularly at the Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai (Domestic Painting Competitive Exhibition), the Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai (Domestic Industrial Exposition), and the Exposition Universelle in Paris of 1900, winning prizes that built his reputation both nationally and internationally.

Gyokusen's institutional career reached its summit in 1904 when, alongside contemporaries such as Kōno Bairei (posthumously), Imao Keinen, Hashimoto Gahō, and Kawabata Gyokushō, he was appointed a Teishitsu Gigeiin (Artist to the Imperial Household), the highest formal honour then conferred on a Japanese painter. He became a member of the Art Committee of the Imperial Household and was thereafter regarded as one of the senior representatives of Kyoto painting alongside Takeuchi Seihō of the next generation. He continued to work into his late seventies, producing paintings of geese in snow, eagles on rocks, waterfalls, and other subjects that combined his lifelong Shijō observational practice with the more atmospheric and decorative modes that Kyoto nihonga had developed by the late Meiji period.

Alongside his painting practice, Gyokusen produced several influential woodblock-printed picture albums (gafu and shūgajō) that disseminated his designs to a wide audience of students, collectors, and rival painters. The most important of these is the Gyokusen shūgajō (玉泉習画帖, Gyokusen's Collected Picture Album), a multi-volume woodblock-printed album published in Kyoto in 1891 (Meiji 24) by Tanaka Jihē, who was one of the principal Kyoto woodblock publishers of the late Meiji period and who issued comparable albums for other Kyoto masters. The shūgajō was conceived as a study album for the use of younger painters and amateurs, organised by subject category and presenting Gyokusen's compositions in the same color-printed format that Imao Keinen's Keinen kachō gafu (1891-1892) employed in the same years. Complete sets of the album entered the major Japanese print collections of Europe and North America in the decades after publication, including the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art Study Collection.

Gyokusen died in Kyoto in 1913 at the age of seventy-nine. His students included his own son Mochizuki Gyokkei (1874-1938), who continued the Mochizuki school into the Taishō and early Shōwa periods, and a wide network of Kyoto painters who passed through the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School during his years of teaching there. Within the broader history of Meiji nihonga, Gyokusen represents a particular kind of conservative Kyoto modernity: rooted in the Shijō-Kanō lineage rather than the Tokyo academic establishment, committed to traditional subject categories and traditional formats (hanging scrolls, folding screens, painted fans, woodblock-printed albums), but increasingly aware of European naturalism and willing to accommodate it in his treatment of light, atmosphere, and animal form. His works are held by the Yale University Art Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, the Tokyo National Museum, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Museum, and other institutions that collected Meiji painting in the early twentieth century. For collectors of Japanese prints, his name is most reliably encountered through the Gyokusen shūgajō and the related Tanaka Jihē Kyoto publications, which sit alongside the works of Bairei, Keinen, and Seihō at the centre of the Meiji Kyoto color-printed picture-album tradition.