Mori Kansai

Mori Kansai (森寛斎, 1814–1894) was the last major master of the Mori 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 carry the Maruyama-Shijō tradition of close natural observation into the institutional structures of Meiji Japan. He was born in Hagi, in the Chōshū domain (Nagato Province, modern Yamaguchi Prefecture), in 1814, the son of a samurai retainer of the Mōri clan.

In 1831 he went to Osaka to study painting under Mori Tetsuzan (1775–1841), a leading master of the Mori school. That school descended from Mori Sosen (1747–1821), the celebrated painter of monkeys, and was rooted in the naturalist manner of the Maruyama school of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795) and the closely related Kishi school of Kishi Ganku (1749–1839) — traditions that combined close zoological observation with the disciplined practice of sketching from life (shasei). Under Tetsuzan the young painter was adopted into the Mori family and took the surname he carried thereafter, along with the art name Kansai by which he became known.

His preferred subjects reflected the inheritance of the Mori school: landscapes and seasonal scenery, animals — with monkeys and deer especially prominent — kachō-e bird-and-flower compositions, and figural, Buddhist, and historical or literary subjects. Alongside his painting he worked in the woodblock medium, designing surimono, the privately commissioned prints made for Kyoto and Osaka poetry circles; the British Museum holds examples, including a Cuckoo and Moon composition and a scene of an Asazuma figure poled in a boat beneath a willow, works that unite Mori-school natural drawing with the literary and kyōka traditions of the surimono genre.

During the turbulent Bakumatsu years Kansai moved between Kyoto and his native Hagi and sympathized with the imperial-restoration cause. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 found him already established as a senior Kyoto painter, and he became one of the leading figures of the city's painting world; after the death of Shiokawa Bunrin he stood at the center of the Jo'unsha (如雲社), an association of Kyoto painters. He was among the teachers when the Kyoto Prefectural School of Painting (Kyōto-fu Gagakkō) opened in 1880, and he exhibited at the national painting expositions of the early Meiji period, winning a second-class prize at the Second Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai in 1881 and a silver award at the First Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai in 1882.

Kansai died in 1894. His work is preserved today in museums in Japan, Europe, and the United States, among them the British Museum and the Walters Art Museum. Among his pupils was Yamamoto Shunkyo, who became a leading painter of the modern Kyoto nihonga movement — a quiet but consequential transmission of the Mori school's discipline of sustained natural observation into the modern Japanese painting tradition.