Tomita Keisen

Tomita Keisen (1879-1936) was a Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa nihonga painter whose work bridged the Kyoto Shijō school of his teachers, the Chinese-derived literati (nanga) tradition he revived for a modern audience, and the Buddhist iconography of Heian-period Japan that he studied at length. Born in Hakata in northern Kyushu (in what is now Fukuoka City) with the given name Shingorō, he moved to Kyoto as a young man and entered the world of Kyoto painting at a moment when the Maruyama-Shijō tradition was being reformulated by Takeuchi Seihō, Kikuchi Hōbun, and others into the modern Kyoto nihonga that would dominate the prefectural art schools and national exhibitions through the early twentieth century.

Keisen's first formal teacher was Kinoshita Itsuun in Nagasaki, a nanga (Southern School) painter from whom he absorbed the literati interest in Chinese poetry, calligraphy, and landscape painting that would become a permanent feature of his work. After moving to Kyoto, he became a student of Tsuji Kakō (1870-1931), a leading Shijō painter and a younger contemporary of Takeuchi Seihō, who emphasized the disciplined sketching-from-life (shasei) of the Maruyama-Shijō tradition while remaining open to broader pictorial experiment. Under Kakō, Keisen acquired the formal grounding in observational drawing of landscape, figure, and bird-and-flower subjects that distinguished Kyoto painting from the more academic Tokyo nihonga schools, while pursuing on his own a deep study of Heian and Kamakura Buddhist painting in the Kyoto temples, of nanga literati models, and of the Sōtatsu-Kōrin (Rinpa) decorative tradition.

From the mid-1900s Keisen exhibited regularly at the Bunten, the national salon-style competition established by the Ministry of Education in 1907, and from the 1910s at the Teiten that succeeded it. In 1915 he joined the Saikō Nihon Bijutsuin (Reorganized Japan Art Institute), the Inten exhibition group reconstituted in 1914 by Yokoyama Taikan, Shimomura Kanzan, and Imamura Shikō as a vehicle for an experimentally minded nihonga that resisted the conservatism of the official salons. He was made a member in 1916, and the Inten became his principal exhibition venue for the rest of his career. Working in Kyoto rather than Tokyo, however, kept his work somewhat apart from the Inten mainstream and gave it a distinctive flavor: nanga compositional habits applied to the wide horizontal sweep of folding screens; literati subjects (Su Dongpo, the West Lake, Mount Penglai, Chinese hermits) rendered with the careful colorism and gold-ground decorative practice of Kyoto nihonga; and Japanese landscape subjects (Ohara in autumn, the Uji River, Nara, the cormorant fishers of the Nagara) reframed through the same nanga and Rinpa sensibility.

Keisen is credited within the history of modern Japanese painting with reviving the nanga tradition for the twentieth-century audience and with developing a new approach to kachō-ga (bird-and-flower painting) that placed familiar subjects (deer in snow, cormorants, autumn grasses) in compositions of unusual atmospheric breadth, often using the wide format of paired folding screens or long hanging scrolls. His treatment of Buddhist subjects, including his Daiitoku Myō-ō (one of the Five Wisdom Kings), reflects the years he spent studying esoteric Buddhist painting in Kyoto temples, while his Chinese-themed works carry the literati seal of an artist who continued to read and write classical poetry as a private discipline. He counted among his admirers the French poet and diplomat Paul Claudel, who served as ambassador to Japan from 1921 to 1927 and who collected and wrote about Keisen's painting, helping to bring his work to the attention of European literary and artistic circles in the 1920s.

Keisen's institutional and exhibition record is anchored at the Inten and in the Kyoto painting world, and his works are now held by the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Adachi Museum of Art (Yasugi), the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto and Tokyo, the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many regional Japanese museums. He died in Kyoto in 1936 at the age of fifty-seven. Although he was less of a system-builder than Yokoyama Taikan in Tokyo or Takeuchi Seihō in Kyoto, his contribution to early twentieth-century nihonga — particularly to the modern reinterpretation of nanga and to the broadening of kachō-ga and figure painting in screen format — places him among the distinctive figures of the Inten generation and a painter whose work has continued to attract serious study in both Japanese and Western scholarship.