Nakamura Fusetsu

Nakamura Fusetsu (中村不折, 1866-1943) was a Meiji-Shōwa yōga (Western-style) oil painter, illustrator and pioneering Sinological calligraphy scholar whose long career spanned the formative period of modern Japanese art from the introduction of oil painting in the 1880s to the eve of the Pacific War. Equally important as painter, book-cover designer and collector-historian of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, he founded the Pacific Painting Society (Taiheiyō Gakai, later Taiheiyō Bijutsukai), illustrated the first edition of Natsume Sōseki's I Am a Cat (1905-06), and built the private collection that became the Calligraphy Museum (Shodō Hakubutsukan) in Negishi, Tokyo, one of the world's principal repositories of East Asian calligraphy.

Fusetsu was born Sakutarō (later styled Fusetsu, meaning 'not bending / unbroken') on 19 August 1866 in the Kōjimachi district of Edo, in the closing year of the Tokugawa shogunate, to a samurai family of the Takatō domain in Shinshū (modern Nagano prefecture). His childhood was disrupted by the Meiji Restoration: his father lost his stipend and the family withdrew to Takatō village, where Sakutarō received a classical Confucian education, learned the Chinese-derived literary calligraphic styles that would shape his later scholarship, and read the Tang and Song poets through whom he came to a lifelong identification with continental high culture. In 1887, at twenty-one, he returned to Tokyo determined to become a painter and entered Koyama Shōtarō's private school the Fudō-sha — the foundational training-ground of so many late-Meiji yōga artists — where he studied alongside the young Aoki Shigeru's predecessors and where Koyama's plein-air, French-academic method gave him his first systematic instruction in oil painting and drawing from the model. He soon also studied with Asai Chū, the dominant figure of the Meiji Bijutsukai (Meiji Art Society) and a key proponent of a more lyrical, Barbizon-derived oil painting than the gaiyō (bright-palette) school of Kuroda Seiki then in the ascendant. From the late 1880s Fusetsu supported himself through journalistic illustration, contributing wood-engraved drawings and photogravure sketches to the Yomiuri Shinbun and the literary magazines of the rapidly modernising Tokyo press, and through his close friendship with the haiku reformer Masaoka Shiki he became attached to the literary circle around Shiki's Hototogisu magazine, providing covers and inset illustrations that brought him into contact with Natsume Sōseki, Takahama Kyoshi and the wider Negishi literary milieu.

In 1900 the Ministry of Education awarded Fusetsu, then thirty-four, a national stipend to study oil painting in France, and from autumn 1901 until his return to Japan in summer 1905 he was based in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens — the conservative French academic celebrated for monumental history painting — and supplementarily with Raphaël Collin, the teacher of Kuroda Seiki and Asai Chū. Laurens's example was decisive: where the Meiji generation around Kuroda had absorbed an Impressionist-tinged plein-air manner, Fusetsu came back committed to the grand-machine tradition of historical and religious figure painting, with its rigorous academic drawing, its multi-figure compositions and its insistence on the subject as the principal vehicle of meaning. His Paris years also included extended study of the museum collections — particularly the antique sculpture and Egyptian and Mesopotamian rooms of the Louvre — and produced the prize he received at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, where his exhibited work was singled out among the Japanese yōga contributions. He travelled briefly to Rome and to the Bay of Naples before returning to Japan via Egypt in 1905, by which date the Russo-Japanese War had transformed Japanese cultural politics and the demand for monumental national-historical painting was at its height.

On his return Fusetsu was immediately enlisted in the principal institutional projects of late-Meiji yōga. In 1902, before his departure for France, he had co-founded with Yoshida Hiroshi, Mitsutani Kunishirō and Ishikawa Toraji the Taiheiyō Gakai (Pacific Painting Society), a body that arose from the dissolution of the Meiji Bijutsukai and was conceived as a counterweight to Kuroda Seiki's Hakubakai. After Fusetsu's return the Taiheiyō Gakai became the principal vehicle for the more conservative, academically-grounded oil painting that he and his Paris-trained colleagues represented, and it sustained annual exhibitions of independent yōga from 1904 until the Pacific War; the society was reorganised after the war as the Taiheiyō Bijutsukai and continues today as one of the major non-governmental art associations of Japan. From 1907 Fusetsu also taught at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts) and served on the jury of the Tokyo Industrial Exhibition (1907) and the new Bunten (Ministry of Education Art Exhibition), the central institution of state-sponsored modern art in late-Meiji and Taishō Japan. He was elected a member of the Imperial Japan Art Academy (Teikoku Bijutsuin) in 1919 and a member of its successor, the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Geijutsuin), in 1937; in 1936 he received the Asahi Cultural Prize for his calligraphic scholarship.

As a painter Fusetsu pursued two interlocking lines: ambitious historical and religious figure paintings drawn from Japanese, Chinese and Greco-Roman antiquity, and a continuing practice of portraiture, life-drawing and nude study that established the academic figure as a foundational subject of Japanese oil painting. His Kenkoku Sōgyō (Founding the Nation, 1907), shown at the Tokyo Industrial Exhibition and unfortunately destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, was the most ambitious of his early national-historical canvases; his Kyojin no Ato (Footprint of the Giant, 1912) and his Bodhidharma cycle — the celebrated Emperor Wu Meets Bodhidharma (1914) at MOMAT — drew their subjects from Chinese Buddhist legend in a manner indebted equally to Laurens's grand-machine tradition and to the literary calligraphic culture in which Fusetsu was immersed. He continued to paint religious and mythological subjects through the 1920s and 1930s, returning periodically to the nude (Ratai, Rafu-ritsuzō) and the portrait (the canonical Self-Portrait of 1930 at MOMAT) as the foundational genres of his practice. Throughout this period he also worked as one of the most sought-after book-cover designers and illustrators of Meiji and Taishō Tokyo: his illustrations for the original serialised and book editions of Natsume Sōseki's I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa Neko de aru, 1905-06) — at once satirical, calligraphically inflected, and unmistakably Western in their command of the cartoon line — defined the visual identity of the most celebrated modern Japanese novel of its generation, and he provided book-jacket designs and frontispieces for Masaoka Shiki, Takahama Kyoshi and many of the other principal writers of the Negishi circle.

Fusetsu's third career, which by his death had eclipsed his reputation as painter, was as a calligrapher and scholar of Chinese epigraphy. From his earliest years he had been engaged with the classical Chinese textual tradition; from the late 1890s onwards, encouraged by the contemporary excitement over the Dunhuang manuscripts and the Han-period bamboo-slip texts excavated in Chinese Turkestan, he began acquiring rubbings, inscribed bronzes, stone-engraved sūtras, brushes and the early-medieval calligraphic copies that were being released onto the international art market through the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Over more than forty years he assembled what was widely recognised as the finest private collection of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy in Japan, and in 1936 he opened it to the public as the Shodō Hakubutsukan (Calligraphy Museum) in Negishi, Tokyo, in a purpose-built museum adjacent to his Japanese-style residence and atelier. The collection — which includes the Tang-period Shōsōin-related fragment Shijing of the Maoshi (a National Treasure of Japan), the Han Cao Quan stele rubbing, and more than fifteen thousand other items — was administered by the Nakamura family until 1995, when it was donated to Taitō Ward, Tokyo, and reopened to the public in 2002 as a municipal museum. It remains the principal monument to Fusetsu's lifelong project of integrating Western academic painting with the continental scholarly tradition. Fusetsu died at his home in Negishi on 6 June 1943, in his seventy-seventh year, and his collected paintings are now held principally at the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT), the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, the Kōsetsu Museum of Art, the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, the Ōita Prefectural Art Museum and the Ina Bunka Kaikan in Nagano, with works also at the Shodō Hakubutsukan and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.