Umehara Ryūzaburō

Umehara Ryūzaburō (梅原龍三郎, 1888-1986) was one of the central figures of twentieth-century Japanese yōga (Western-style painting), an early disciple of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in Paris, and — together with Yasui Sōtarō — one of the two painters most often credited with consolidating modern oil painting as a serious Japanese discipline in the decades on either side of the Second World War.

NOTE ON SLUG: in the Hanga roster this artist is filed under the legacy slug `umetaro-azechi-alt`, a holdover from an earlier import collision; he should not be confused with Azechi Umetarō (畦地梅太郎, 1902-1999), the entirely separate sōsaku-hanga mountain printmaker.

Born on 9 March 1888 in Kyoto into a kimono fabric merchant family in the Takeyamachi district, Umehara left middle school in 1903 to study Western-style painting at the Kyoto Shōgōin Yōga Kenkyūjo under Asai Chū and Kanokogi Takeshirō. In 1908, at the age of twenty, he travelled to Paris with his close friend Yasui Sōtarō, and almost immediately on arrival he sought out Renoir at his villa Les Collettes in Cagnes-sur-Mer. Renoir accepted the young Japanese painter as a personal student and the two formed a friendship that endured until the older painter's death in 1919. Umehara's early Parisian canvases are openly Renoir-derived — fleshy nudes in chalky pinks, jardin landscapes, dappled light through windows — but already show the heavy, almost lacquer-like impasto and the unblended pure colour that would characterise his mature manner.

He returned to Tokyo in 1913 and held an explosive first solo exhibition at the Venus Club, was a founding member of the Nika-kai (Second Section Society) splinter group in 1914, and from the late 1910s onwards alternated long Paris stays with summer painting trips through China — particularly Beijing, where between 1939 and 1943 he produced his celebrated Forbidden City and Tian'anmen series — and through Atami, Karuizawa, Sakurajima and other Japanese sites. The Beijing canvases, with their saturated vermilions, ultramarines and golds set against the architecture of the Ming and Qing palaces, are generally regarded as his masterworks, and most of the major examples now hang at the Artizon Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT), the Bridgestone Museum of Art and the Hiroshima Museum of Art.

In 1944 Umehara was appointed to the Imperial Art Academy and to a professorship at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (which he resigned in 1952 after disputes with the postwar reformed faculty). He was awarded Japan's Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō) in 1952 and continued to paint into his nineties, returning compulsively to nude studies, Atami coastal views, and Mount Asama. He died on 16 January 1986 in Tokyo at the age of ninety-seven, and was buried at Tama Reien.

Copyright status. Because Umehara died in 1986, his entire oeuvre remains under copyright in Japan until 31 December 2056 under the life-plus-seventy regime adopted in 2018 via the TPP-11 implementing legislation. The same works are equally under US copyright through the URAA restorations and the long terms applicable to twentieth-century foreign works. As a result, no open-access digitisation of an Umehara painting currently exists at the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, or any other API-accessible Western institution, and the Wikimedia Commons category for him contains only six files, all of which are photographs of the artist (or his grave or peers) rather than reproductions of his paintings. Until the 2057 copyright clearance, there is no legitimate sourcing path for Umehara images through Hanga's standard open-access pipeline, and he is therefore deferred from acquisition. He would be a high-priority candidate for inclusion as soon as a Japanese museum publishes high-resolution open-access reproductions under a usable licence — a precedent that already exists at MOMAT and the Tokyo National Museum for older yōga painters.