Tomioka Tessai

Tomioka Tessai (1837-1924) was the last major Japanese painter in the bunjinga (literati painting) tradition and one of the most celebrated artistic figures of the Meiji and Taishō periods. Born Tomioka Yusuke in Kyoto on the nineteenth day of the twelfth month of Tenpō 7 (corresponding to January 25, 1837) into a family of Kyoto merchants who dealt in priestly vestments, Tessai grew up in a milieu saturated with classical scholarship, Confucian learning, Shintō ritual, and the literary traditions of Chinese and Japanese antiquity. He combined this scholarly foundation with a long, restless career as a painter to produce a body of work that bridged the world of late-Edo nanga (Southern School painting) and the institutional structures of modern Japanese nihonga, while remaining stylistically and philosophically committed to the ideal of the scholar-painter — the bunjin — whose pictures expressed personality, learning, and moral character rather than professional craft.

Tessai's earliest training was not in painting but in classical letters. He was educated first as a scholar — in the Japanese national-learning tradition (kokugaku), classical Chinese philosophy and literature, and the ancient Japanese classics — under a succession of noted Kyoto teachers. As a young man he was taken in by the celebrated Buddhist nun and poet Ōtagaki Rengetsu, with whom he lived and worked for a time and who became his most important early mentor and supporter, decisively shaping his commitment to literary art and to the poetry-painting integration that defined the bunjin ideal. He turned to painting in his youth, studying with masters including Ukita Ikkei, from whom he absorbed the yamato-e revival tradition, and Oda Kaisen, who schooled him in the nanga (Southern School) manner. Throughout his career Tessai insisted that he was a scholar first and a painter second, signing many works with phrases asserting the primacy of his bookish learning over his brushwork — a stance that placed him squarely in the Chinese literati tradition descended from the Yuan-dynasty masters and reaffirmed by the great late-Ming theorist Dong Qichang.

The early Meiji years brought Tessai into close contact with the Shintō revival, and from the 1870s into the early 1890s he served as a Shintō priest at several shrines, including the Isonokami Shrine at Tenri, near Nara, and the Ōtori Shrine in Sakai. The travel demanded by these appointments was decisive for his painting: Tessai made extended sketching journeys across the Japanese countryside, climbing mountains, visiting temples, copying old paintings and inscriptions, and developing an inexhaustible repertoire of landscape, figure, and historical subjects drawn from Japanese and Chinese antiquity. By the 1890s, when he settled into a full-time painting career in Kyoto, he had built up the deep stock of motifs and the eccentric, energetic brush style that defined his late career.

Tessai's mature painting, produced in extraordinary quantity from the 1890s into the 1920s, draws on the entire repertoire of East Asian classical subject matter: Chinese mountain landscapes in the manner of the Song and Yuan masters, Daoist immortals (Lü Dongbin, the Eight Immortals, the Three Stars of happiness, prosperity, and longevity), Confucian sages (Confucius and his disciples, the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove), Zen patriarchs (Bodhidharma, Hanshan and Shide), Japanese national heroes (Sugawara no Michizane, the loyal retainers of the Nanbokuchō wars), and scenes from Chinese poetry (the journey of Tao Yuanming, the Red Cliff excursions of Su Shi, the gathering at the Orchid Pavilion of Wang Xizhi). His handling is by turns dense and broken-brushed, with vibrant mineral colors and rough, calligraphic ink lines that recall the late paintings of the seventeenth-century Chinese individualists such as Shitao and Bada Shanren; his compositions can feel improvisatory and densely packed, often with lengthy inscriptions in cursive script that occupy a major share of the picture surface. Tessai's inscriptions, in elegant classical Chinese or Japanese, frequently quote the source texts of his subjects, and his paintings should be read as integrated literary objects rather than as pure visual compositions.

In the institutional landscape of Meiji and Taishō Japan, Tessai occupied a singular position. In 1897 he joined Tanomura Chokunyū in founding the Nihon Nanga Kyōkai (Japan Nanga Association), an organization dedicated to preserving the bunjinga tradition against the institutional dominance of yōga (Western-style oil painting) and the rising Kyoto and Tokyo nihonga schools. He exhibited at major national salons and was the subject of growing critical attention from the 1900s onward, recognized as the inheritor of an older, more cosmopolitan ideal of the painter-scholar. In 1917 he was appointed a member of the Art Committee of the Imperial Household (Teishitsu Gigeiin), and in 1919 he became a member of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (Teikoku Bijutsuin) — the highest official honors then available to a Japanese painter. He continued to paint and write with undiminished vigor into his late eighties, producing some of his most ambitious works after the age of eighty, and died in Kyoto on December 31, 1924.

Tessai's legacy is unusual among the modern masters of Japanese painting because, although his style was deliberately archaic and his theoretical position deliberately anti-modern, his energy and inventiveness produced an oeuvre that twentieth-century viewers recognized as fully contemporary in its expressive freedom. His paintings entered major collections in his own lifetime — the Kiyoshi Kōjin Seichō-ji temple in Hyōgo Prefecture holds the largest single collection and maintains a dedicated Tessai memorial museum on its grounds, and works by Tessai are now held by the Tokyo National Museum, Kyoto National Museum, Museum of Modern Art Kyoto, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, British Museum, Worcester Art Museum, and many others. Although Tessai is primarily a painter rather than a print artist — and so falls on the margins of the Japanese woodblock tradition — his influence on the kindred late-Meiji and Taishō movements that did engage with printmaking (the Kyoto Shijō school, the early shin-hanga movement, the literary illustration of nanga revivalists) gives him a structural place in any account of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese pictorial art, and his work has had a sustained presence in the Western collecting market for nihonga and nanga since the major postwar surveys of his career.