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 Taki Kin'ichirō in Edo (Tokyo) on the fifteenth day of the fifth month of Bunsei 13 (July 5, 1830), the son of a samurai of modest rank. He showed early skill in painting and at thirteen entered the studio of the nanga master Ōoka Unpō (1764-1848), a senior figure in the Edo nanga circle and a direct transmitter of the Chinese-influenced literati tradition that descended from Sakaki Hyakusen, Ike no Taiga, and Tani Bunchō. After Unpō's death in 1848, Katei pursued further training with the painter Araki Kōin and traveled extensively in Japan to study Chinese paintings and rubbings in temple and private collections; these years of fieldwork laid the foundation for his lifelong technical command of the Ming- and Qing-dynasty styles that he would later adapt for Meiji-period audiences. He took the art name Katei (和亭, "Pavilion of Harmony") and by the 1860s had established a Tokyo painting practice that placed him among the leading nanga painters of the late Edo capital.

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 every subsequent national exhibition, winning a series of prizes that established him as one of the principal Tokyo painters of his generation. His work at the Japan-British Exhibition in London in 1910 (posthumously) and his earlier appearances at international expositions in Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), Paris (1878), and Chicago (1893) gave his densely colored bird-and-flower compositions a wide European audience and established 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 suite of ornamental bird-and-flower paintings he contributed to the imperial reception rooms. In 1893 he was formally appointed Teishitsu Gigeiin (Imperial Household Artist), the highest official honor available to a Japanese painter, alongside such figures as Hashimoto Gahō, Kawabata Gyokushō, and Mori Kansai. He also served on the Bunten (Ministry of Education Art Exhibition) jury system as it took shape in the 1890s and exhibited with the Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai (Japan Art Association), the leading conservative artists' organization of the period and a counterweight to Okakura Kakuzō's reformist Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute).