Morita Tsunetomo

Morita Tsunetomo (森田恒友, 1881-1933) was a Japanese yōga (Western-style) painter and printmaker whose work bridged French post-impressionism, the literati tradition of the Edo bunjin, and the lyrical pastoral imagery of the Musashino plains around Tokyo. Born on 9 April 1881 in the village of Tamai in Saitama prefecture — today absorbed into the city of Kumagaya — he grew up within easy view of the broad alluvial landscape of the Kantō region that would later become the dominant subject of his mature painting. He died in Tokyo on 8 April 1933, one day before his fifty-second birthday.

Morita's formal training followed the standard Meiji yōga pathway. At the age of twenty-three he entered the Western-painting (seiyōga) department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō), where he studied under two of the central figures of Meiji oil painting: Koyama Shōtarō (1857-1916), who had trained in the academic naturalism of Antonio Fontanesi at the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō, and Nakamura Fusetsu (1866-1943), one of the leading members of the Hakubakai (White Horse Society) and a painter known for blending European technique with Japanese subject matter. From these teachers Morita acquired a thorough grounding in academic drawing and plein-air landscape practice, but also an early awareness that yōga in Japan would always need to negotiate between imported European pictorial language and indigenous artistic memory.

While still a young painter he began to participate in the broader print and illustration culture of late Meiji Tokyo. Together with Ishii Hakutei (1882-1958) and Yamamoto Kanae (1882-1946) — the same Yamamoto who would soon become a founding figure of the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement — Morita co-published the small art journal Hōsun (方寸), one of several short-lived but historically important Meiji-Taishō little magazines that promoted independent printmaking, lithography and woodblock as an artist-driven rather than publisher-driven practice. The Hōsun circle was a formative environment for the next generation of yōga painters and gave Morita a foothold in the experimental print culture that surrounded the salon system. In 1907 one of his oil paintings was accepted into the first Bunten exhibition organised by the Ministry of Education, marking his entry into the official Meiji exhibition circuit.

In 1914 Morita travelled to Europe, settling first in Paris and then spending an extended period in Brittany, where he painted in the small fishing villages along the Atlantic coast. It was during this trip that he encountered the work of Paul Cézanne in depth, and his Breton landscapes from 1915 show an emerging interest in compressed pictorial space, geometric simplification of foliage and rooflines, and a more analytical use of colour than his pre-departure Tokyo work. The outbreak of the First World War curtailed his European stay and he returned to Japan in 1915. The Cézannian lessons remained central to him for the rest of his life, but he also began to question whether oil painting in the European manner was the only — or the most natural — vehicle for a Japanese painter responding to the landscape of his own country.

Back in Tokyo, Morita took up a position in the yōga (Western painting) department of the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Fine Arts Academy) in 1916, and over the next several years became a central figure in the institutional reorganisation of Western painting in Taishō Japan. In 1922 he co-founded the Shun'yōkai (春陽会, Spring Sun Society) together with Yamamoto Kanae, Ishii Hakutei, Kosugi Hōan, Kobayashi Tokusaburō and other former Bijutsuin members, as a society dedicated to free, anti-academic Western-style painting outside the official Bunten/Teiten framework. The Shun'yōkai would go on to become one of the most influential alternative exhibition societies of the interwar period, hosting many of the painters who shaped Shōwa-era yōga, and Morita's role in its founding established him as one of the senior figures of the Taishō avant-garde. In 1929 he was appointed Director of the Western Painting Department at the Imperial Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsu Gakkō, the institution that became Musashino Art University), giving him an official teaching role to match his exhibition-society standing.

The most distinctive feature of Morita's mature work is its turn away from European oil painting and toward an East Asian medium and idiom. From around 1920 onward — and increasingly in the last decade of his life — he produced landscapes and pastoral scenes in sumi ink and light colour on paper, often as hanging scrolls or album leaves, in a manner consciously indebted to the literati (bunjin) tradition of the Edo period. He was especially attracted to the work of the late Edo literati painter Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841), whose combination of careful observational drawing with poetic restraint Morita took as a Japanese parallel to what Cézanne had been doing in Provence. The resulting hybrid — a painter trained in oil, fluent in post-impressionist structure, working in ink on paper in a modernised nihonga-bunjinga mode — gave Morita a position that no other major Taishō yōga painter quite occupied. He was associated above all with the Musashino plains and the surrounding lakes and rice fields, and was nicknamed by contemporaries 'the poet of the plains' (heigen no shijin) for the quiet, ruminative tone of his landscape brushwork.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York preserves a representative example of this mature ink mode in its hanging scroll Early Evening (1920), a sparsely populated landscape rendered in a narrow range of ink tones, with soft wet brushstrokes and washes that produce a deliberately blurred, atmospheric effect — a quintessentially literati image filtered through a yōga painter's sense of pictorial weight and recession. The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, near the painter's birthplace, holds a comparable ink-on-paper hanging scroll, Foot of a Mountain (1920), and the larger Saitama collection — supplemented by works at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art and several other regional Japanese institutions — represents the deepest single body of his work. In the Kumagaya area, his early oil paintings such as Washing Place in Farmhouse (1901) and the celebrated Lakeside (Kohan, 1907) — the latter shown at the first Bunten exhibition — record the Meiji yōga student before the European turn, and remain canonical examples of late Meiji plein-air painting in Japan.

Morita's writing should not be overlooked. Under the pen name Heiya (平野, 'plain field'), he produced a steady stream of essays and short instructional texts on painting throughout the 1920s, several of which were collected and published posthumously in 1934. He was, by the standards of his generation, an unusually articulate theorist of the mutual translation between Cézannian structural landscape and East Asian ink painting, and his essays helped lay some of the conceptual groundwork for the broader interwar synthesis of nihonga and yōga that figures such as Yasuda Yukihiko, Yokoyama Taikan and Umehara Ryūzaburō pursued in their different ways.

Within the larger history of modern Japanese painting, Morita Tsunetomo occupies a position that is both characteristic of his generation and quietly singular. He was a Meiji-trained yōga painter who passed through the obligatory European pilgrimage, returned home to take up a senior teaching post and help found an avant-garde exhibition society, and then — at the height of his institutional standing — chose to spend the last decade of his life painting modest ink landscapes in a self-consciously literati idiom. For collectors and viewers interested in the Taishō-Shōwa transition, his work offers an unusually clear case study of how Cézanne, Watanabe Kazan, and the Musashino plains could be brought into a single picture.