Okakura Shūsui

Okakura Shūsui (岡倉秋水, 1869-1950) was a Meiji–Shōwa nihonga painter and book illustrator who spent his entire career in the orbit of Kanō Hōgai's revival of late-Edo Buddhist painting and of Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin), the art theorist and founder of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts to whom he was related and from whom he took the family name under which he signed his work. Born Okakura Kakuhei (岡倉覚平) in Fukui Prefecture in 1869, Shūsui trained under Hōgai during the final years of the senior master's life, enrolled in the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo School of Fine Arts) at its founding in 1889, and went on to a long and quiet career as an instructor at the Peers' College (Gakushūin), a contributor to the international illustrated book trade that flourished in Tokyo during the 1890s, and a figure on the institutional periphery of the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin) and its successors. He is best known today for his close copy of Hōgai's iconic Hibo Kannon (Kannon as Merciful Mother), now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and for the six color woodblock prints he designed for Choix de fables de La Fontaine illustrées par un groupe des meilleurs artistes de Tokio (1894), the first major Japanese-illustrated foreign-language book project, commissioned by the French collector Pierre Barboutau. His career bridges the late-Meiji workshop world of Hōgai's Buddhist nihonga and the early-twentieth-century internationalization of Japanese print culture, and it sits on the institutional boundary between the Tokyo School of Fine Arts circle led by his older relative Tenshin and the more independent painters of the Nihon Bijutsuin.

Shūsui was born on 16 June 1869 in Fukui Prefecture, in the year following the Meiji Restoration. The Okakura family had connections to the Mito-Echizen merchant and intellectual networks that produced both Kakuzō (born 1862, in Yokohama) and Shūsui, and the two appear in some sources as cousins and in others as nephew and uncle — the genealogical record is not consistent, but a close family relationship is well attested by their joint participation in the same Tokyo-based artistic circle from the late 1880s onward. As a teenager Shūsui was taken on as a pupil by Kanō Hōgai (1828-1888), the last great master of the Kanō school, who by the early Meiji period had become the central figure in Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Tenshin's program to renew Japanese painting on the basis of classical Kanō and Buddhist models. Hōgai's pupils were few and personally selected, and Shūsui's apprenticeship in the mid-1880s gave him direct contact with the studio practice in which Hōgai produced the great Buddhist paintings of his last years — among them the Hibo Kannon (Kannon as Merciful Mother) of 1888, which became the founding icon of the new nihonga movement.

In 1889, the year after Hōgai's death, Shūsui enrolled in the Western Painting Section's parallel Japanese-style classes at the newly founded Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō, directed by his relative Okakura Tenshin and by Fenollosa. He left the school in 1890 — a notably short period of formal study, parallel to the careers of several other Hōgai pupils who preferred direct apprenticeship to the new institutional framework — and took up a teaching position at a girls' higher school in Tokyo. By the mid-1890s he had moved to the Peers' College (Gakushūin), the elite school for the children of the Japanese aristocracy and the Imperial family, where he taught Japanese-style painting to several generations of Gakushūin students until his retirement. Like many of his Hōgai-trained contemporaries, Shūsui's day-to-day life as an artist was structured around classroom teaching rather than around the exhibition circuit of the Bunten and Teiten; the small body of independent paintings he produced was made in the margins of an institutional career.