Nakagawa Hachirō

Nakagawa Hachirō (中川八郎, 1877-1922) was a Meiji and Taishō-era yōga (Western-style) painter whose short, peripatetic career placed him among the second generation of Japanese watercolourists trained in the wake of the country's accelerated absorption of European academic painting after the Meiji Restoration. Born in Ehime prefecture on the island of Shikoku in 1877, he made his way to Tokyo in adolescence to pursue an artistic vocation and studied under the pioneering yōga master Koyama Shōtarō (1857-1916) at the Fudōsha (不同舎), the private painting school Koyama had established in Hongō in 1894. Fudōsha was, alongside the Hakubakai (White Horse Society) of Kuroda Seiki, one of the two principal training grounds for early twentieth-century Western-style painters in Japan, and Koyama — himself a student of the foreign-employed Italian painter Antonio Fontanesi at the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō (Technical Fine Arts School) in the 1870s — passed on to his pupils a sober, drawing-led approach to Western pictorial method that owed as much to Barbizon naturalism and the Italian academy as to French Impressionism.

Nakagawa absorbed this training thoroughly in the second half of the 1890s and emerged from Fudōsha as a watercolourist of distinct sensibility. The decision to work principally in watercolour rather than oil paint was not unusual for his cohort: watercolour was the medium through which Western pictorial techniques were most rapidly disseminated to a Japanese audience in the late nineteenth century — through textbooks, through visiting British and Continental artists, and through the early curriculum at Fudōsha itself — and it remained for many young yōga painters the more affordable, more portable, and more idiomatically expressive vehicle. In Nakagawa's hands the medium produced a body of work that joined the open, atmospheric handling of late-Victorian English watercolour with subjects firmly rooted in the Japanese countryside: village streets in winter snow, sailing vessels on coastal mudflats, temples half-hidden in bamboo groves, rain-darkened cherry trees, irises along the canals of suburban Tokyo, autumn fields, and the laborious daily traffic of farmers and travellers. He signed his works most often in roman letters as 'H. Nakagawa,' sometimes with the addition of 'Tokio' or a date — a signature pattern that suggests an artist conscious of an international as well as a domestic audience.

The defining episode of his career was his journey to the United States in 1904, when he was selected by the Japanese government to represent the country at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis. He travelled in the company of two younger painters of close artistic affinity: the watercolourist Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950) — later a foundational figure of the shin-hanga print movement — and the oil painter Mitsutani Kunishirō (1874-1936). The three formed an informal travelling exhibition party whose watercolours made a strong impression in cities such as St Louis, Boston, Detroit, and Indianapolis. The John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis (now the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields) acquired two important Nakagawa works, 'Tanabe Harbor' and 'Dawn,' during this period (accessions 04.2 and 04.4 of 1904), and these holdings remain among the earliest acquisitions of any modern Japanese painter by an American public collection. The 1904 American tour also yielded a substantial body of watercolours that entered private hands across the eastern United States and which still surface, more than a century later, in regional American auctions — most signed and dated in the artist's hand, many bearing the address 'Tokio' beneath the signature.

On his return to Japan, Nakagawa continued to exhibit through the principal Tokyo salons of the late Meiji and Taishō period. He was among the founders, in 1913, of the Nihon Suisaiga-kai (Japan Watercolour Society) — the formal national society for Western-style watercolourists — and he showed regularly at its exhibitions alongside artists including Maruyama Banka, Ōshita Tōjirō, and Mitsutani. A surviving group photograph of around 1910 shows him in a gathering that included Yoshida Hiroshi, Mitsutani Kunishirō, the yōga painter Ishikawa Toraji, and the early lithographer Nagatochi Hideta — a visual record of a tight, mutually supporting circle of cosmopolitan painters who had moved between Europe, the United States, and Tokyo during the previous decade.

Nakagawa's working life was cut short by ill health in his early forties; he died in Tokyo in 1922 at the age of forty-five, before the full mature ambition of his watercolour idiom could be carried into the more openly experimental currents of late-Taishō and early-Shōwa painting. The eclipse of watercolour by oil paint as the dominant Western medium in Japanese art schools from the 1910s onward, together with the broader narrative concentration of art history on the great oil painters of the Hakubakai (Kuroda, Kume, Okada Saburōsuke) and on the print-makers of the shin-hanga movement, contributed to his relative invisibility in twentieth-century surveys. His name is now most often encountered in connection with Yoshida Hiroshi — whose own watercolour and print career was decisively shaped by the 1903-1905 American journeys he made with Nakagawa — and in the catalogues of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Library of Congress, which together hold the most accessible institutional record of his work.

The accessible body of Nakagawa's surviving paintings is small but stylistically coherent. He returns repeatedly to the same vocabulary of motifs: the low, broad shoreline of the inland-sea coast; the temple gate seen through bamboo or maple; the small farming village under rain or snow; the half-dozen figures on a road or in a boat, never individualised but rendered with the loose, summary stroke characteristic of watercolour at speed; and the carefully observed sky, often slate-grey or rose-tinted, which provides the dominant tonal register of each composition. His palette tends toward the muted greens, slate blues, ochres, and burnt sienna of late-nineteenth-century English watercolour, and his draughtsmanship retains the underlying academic discipline of Koyama's Fudōsha. Within the larger story of Japanese yōga between Meiji and Taishō, Nakagawa Hachirō is best understood as one of the most cosmopolitan and accomplished of the Fudōsha watercolourists, a painter who carried the discipline of Koyama Shōtarō's academic training into a relaxed, atmospheric watercolour idiom and who, through his 1904 American journey with Yoshida Hiroshi and Mitsutani Kunishirō, helped to establish modern Japanese painting as a presence in early-twentieth-century American collections.