Mori Kansai

Mori Kansai (森寛斎, 1814-1894) was the last great master of the Mori-Kishi school of Japanese painting and one of the central figures of mid-nineteenth-century Kyoto art, a painter whose career bridged the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods and helped pass the Maruyama-Shijō and Kishi traditions of close natural observation into the institutional structures of Meiji Japan. He was born in Hagi in the western province of Chōshū (modern Yamaguchi Prefecture) in 1814 as Konoike Hidesuke, the son of a samurai retainer of the Mōri clan, and came of age in a domain that, by virtue of its political and cultural connections, regularly sent talented young men to Kyoto and Osaka for advanced study. In that current the young Hidesuke traveled to Kyoto and entered the studio of Mori Tetsuzan (1775-1841), the leading painter of the Mori-Kishi school in the early nineteenth century.

The Kishi school had been founded a generation earlier by Kishi Ganku (1749-1839), who combined the close zoological observation of the Maruyama school of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795) with the dramatic brushwork of Chinese-style painting and a specialization in the depiction of tigers and other powerful animals; the Mori branch, descending from Ganku's contemporary Mori Sosen (1747-1821) — the master of monkey painting — added the realistic study of monkeys, deer, and other small forest creatures that became one of the school's enduring signatures. Mori Tetsuzan, Sosen's adopted son and Kansai's first master, was a major painter of birds, flowers, and animals in the Mori manner, and under his instruction the young Hidesuke absorbed the disciplined sketching-from-life (shasei) practice that defined Kyoto realist painting in the Bakumatsu period. When Tetsuzan died in 1841, the studio passed to his son Mori Ippō (1798-1871), under whom Kansai continued to study and into whose family he was eventually adopted, taking the Mori surname and the art name Kansai (寛斎, "broad studio") that he carried for the rest of his life.

Kansai's mature career unfolded across roughly forty years, from the late 1840s to his death in 1894, during which time he produced an enormous range of work in every traditional Japanese painting format: hanging scrolls (kakemono), handscrolls (emakimono), folding screens (byōbu), sliding doors (fusuma and itado), ceremonial commissions, illustrated woodblock books, and individual color woodblock prints and surimono. His preferred subjects reflect the inheritance of the Mori-Kishi school — landscapes of Kyoto and the seasonal scenery of Yamashiro and Yamato; animals, with monkeys, deer, and tanuki especially prominent in his repertoire; kachō-e bird-and-flower compositions including extensive butterfly, insect, and seashell studies; figural and Buddhist subjects such as the Eight Immortals, the sixteen arhats, and Chinese sages and warriors; and historical or literary scenes drawn from the Genji and Heike narratives and from the kabuki and jōruri stage. His brushwork combined the controlled outline and washes of the Mori-Kishi naturalist tradition with a certain crisp angularity that distinguished his hand from those of contemporaries in the closely related Maruyama-Shijō schools of Kōno Bairei (1844-1895), Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891), and Suzuki Hyakunen (1825-1891).