Tanigami Kōnan

Tanigami Kōnan (谷上廣南, c. 1879–1928) was a Kyoto-based Japanese painter and woodblock-print designer whose specialism in kachō-e (bird-and-flower prints) led to two of the most ambitious botanical print projects of the Taishō era: the multi-volume Sekai Hyaku Kachō (One Hundred Birds and Flowers of the World, 1916–1925) and the three-volume Zōkei Kaben Chō (Large-Format Flowers, 1923–1929). He was a generation younger than the Meiji kachō-e masters Kōno Bairei (1844–1895) and Imao Keinen (1845–1924), and he absorbed from them and from the broader Maruyama-Shijō tradition the careful observational drawing, restrained outline, and saturated polychrome that characterize his mature work. What separated Kōnan from his teachers was his willingness to apply that traditional pictorial language to subjects drawn from the new sciences of his day: Western horticulture, botanical illustration, and the ornithology of regions far beyond Japan.

Biographical detail is sparse. Kōnan was born in 1879, almost certainly in or near Kyoto, and entered the Maruyama-Shijō painting world there in the early 1890s. He studied under Kōno Bairei, whose Kyoto Painting Academy (Kyoto Furitsu Gagakkō, the precursor of the present Kyoto City University of Arts) was the most important training ground for late-Meiji Nihonga painters in western Japan, and Kōnan's drawings of flowers and birds show the unmistakable Bairei manner of fine outline, careful observation, and discreet color. After Bairei's death in 1895, Kōnan continued working in Kyoto under loose affiliation with the broader Maruyama-Shijō painters of the city. He exhibited at the Kyoto and Osaka government-sponsored exhibitions in the early Taishō era and built relationships with the Kyoto woodblock-print publishers Yamada Naosaburō and Unsōdō, both of whom had business models that depended on supplying Kyoto kachō-e to a domestic market and to American and European tourist collectors passing through Kobe and Yokohama.

Kōnan's first major publishing project was Sekai Hyaku Kachō (世界百花鳥, One Hundred Birds and Flowers of the World), a series issued by Unsōdō in five volumes between 1916 and 1925. The project's ambition was distinctly modern. Where earlier kachō-e albums had limited themselves to native Japanese flora and fauna or to a slightly broader East Asian field, Kōnan and Unsōdō set out to document birds from every continent in a series of carefully drawn double-page color woodblock plates. The subjects ranged from European warblers and African crowned cranes to American hummingbirds and Australian honeyeaters; each plate paired the bird with a representative flowering branch of the species's habitat. The visual model lay halfway between traditional kachō-e and Western scientific illustration: Kōnan retained the asymmetrical composition, calligraphic line, and untreated paper ground of the Edo and Meiji tradition, but the species depicted were drawn with the binomial specificity of a field guide and the plumage colors were keyed to ornithological references. The Unsōdō carvers and printers translated his designs into deeply saturated polychrome impressions of unusual technical complexity, often requiring eight to twelve overlay impressions per image. The series has been collected steadily by ornithological libraries (notably the Yale Peabody and the American Museum of Natural History) since the 1920s and is held in many North American natural-history collections as much as in art collections.