Taki Katei

Taki Katei (瀧和亭, 1830-1901) was one of the leading nanga (Japanese literati) painters of the late Edo and Meiji periods, an Imperial Household Artist (Teishitsu Gigeiin), and the painter who, more than any other single figure, carried the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sinophile literati tradition of Chinese-style ink and color painting into the institutional art world of late nineteenth-century Tokyo. He was the highest-paid painter in the Meiji government's scheme to decorate the new Imperial Palace, completed in 1888, and his densely colored bird-and-flower paintings (kachō-e) and Chinese-subject figure compositions occupy a distinctive place between the inherited nanga manner he had absorbed in his youth and the new demands of Meiji-period national exhibition culture.

Katei was born in the Sendagaya district of Edo (Tokyo) on January 27, 1830, the son of a masterless samurai (rōnin) whose family had come from Aki Province to the shogun's city. He showed early skill in painting and began his training around the age of seven, studying first with the painter Satō Suigai and then with Suigai's own teacher, the nanga master Ōoka Unpō, from whom he learned the techniques of bird-and-flower painting and sketching from life (shasei). In 1851 he traveled to Nagasaki, then Japan's principal window on the outside world, where he studied for some months with the painter Hidaka Tetsuō and became acquainted with resident Chinese artists — an encounter that deepened his command of the Ming- and Qing-dynasty styles he would later adapt for Meiji-period audiences. Over the following years he traveled widely through Japan, including the northern regions of Niigata, Sado, Sakata, and Hakodate, and by the 1860s had established his own painting practice in Edo under the art name Katei.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated the most productive phase of Katei's career. Where many traditional painters struggled against the rapid Westernization of education and the institutional displacement of inherited brush practices by yōga (Western oil painting), Katei found his Chinese-style literati manner unexpectedly well suited to the new national exhibition culture and to the official Meiji program of court patronage. He exhibited at the first Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai (National Industrial Exhibition) in 1877 and at later national expositions, as well as at the domestic competitive painting exhibitions of the early 1880s, establishing himself as one of the principal Tokyo painters of his generation. His work also appeared at international expositions in Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), and Paris (1900), giving his densely colored bird-and-flower compositions a wide European audience and helping to establish the visual character of late-nineteenth-century Japanese painting for Western collectors.

Katei's most consequential institutional role came through the Imperial Household. Beginning in 1881 he received a steady stream of commissions from the imperial court, and in the great project to decorate the new Imperial Palace (Meiji-kyū), completed in 1888, he was paid more than any other painter for the ornamental bird-and-flower paintings he contributed to the imperial reception rooms. In 1893 he was formally appointed Teishitsu Gigeiin (Imperial Household Artist), among the highest official honors available to a Japanese painter and a title held by only a small number of artists. He was aligned with the conservative, traditionalist wing of the Meiji art world and its artists' organizations, a counterweight to the reform movement then gathering around Okakura Kakuzō.

Katei's mature manner — the work for which he is best known to museum audiences — was a heavily worked, densely colored variation on the Ming- and Qing-style kachō-e tradition that he had absorbed in his youth. He developed a body of meticulous, technically virtuosic painting on silk, in which birds, flowers, peaches, lotus, plum, narcissus, deer, and other auspicious subjects were rendered with an exhaustive attention to leaf, feather, and petal that pushed the limits of the medium. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's album Flowers and Birds (1975.282.1a-m) and its hanging scroll Deer by Mountain Stream (1981.26), painted in January 1896, together give a principal account of this style in a major Western collection; his work is also held by the British Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and National Museums Liverpool, among other institutions. He likewise took part in the high-end Meiji print trade, contributing to deluxe woodblock-printed collector's albums of flowers and birds such as the one published by Hakubunsha in 1887.

Katei was also one of the central nineteenth-century Japanese painters of Chinese literary and historical subjects, executing large-format hanging scrolls on themes such as the elegant gathering of literati at the Orchid Pavilion — the fourth-century literary assembly associated with Wang Xizhi that became a touchstone of the East Asian literati tradition. Throughout his career he insisted on the centrality of Chinese painting and calligraphy to the Japanese literati inheritance — a position that placed him, in the rapidly shifting cultural politics of Meiji Japan, both at the center of imperial patronage and in increasing tension with the rising nihonga reform movement, which emphasized native Japanese rather than Sino-Japanese roots for the modern national style.

Katei died in Tokyo on September 28, 1901, at the age of seventy-one. Among his pupils were Ishibashi Kazunori, Satō Shien, and Yamamoto Shōun; his son Taki Seiichi (1873-1945) became a prominent art historian, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and an editor of the journal Kokka. Katei's place in the history of modern Japanese painting was the subject of a major scholarly reassessment in Rosina Buckland's Painting Nature for the Nation: Taki Katei and the Challenges to Sinophile Culture in Meiji Japan (Brill, 2013). A large collection of his working drawings at National Museums Liverpool — which passed from his pupil Ishibashi Kazunori to the Boult family and was donated by Sir Adrian Boult in 1956 — has anchored the modern re-evaluation of Katei both as the leading nineteenth-century Japanese practitioner of the Chinese-style nanga tradition and as a key participant in the institutional reorganization of Japanese painting under the Meiji Imperial Household system.