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), a pupil of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in France, 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. He should not be confused with Azechi Umetarō (畦地梅太郎, 1902-1999), a separate sōsaku-hanga printmaker known for his mountain subjects.

Born on 9 March 1888 in Kyoto into a family that ran a textile (kimono-fabric) wholesaling business, Umehara left middle school as a young man to study Western-style painting at the Shōgōin Institute of Western Painting in Kyoto under Asai Chū, where his fellow students included Yasui Sōtarō. In 1908, at the age of twenty, he left for France, and in the south of the country he sought out Renoir — then living at Les Collettes in Cagnes-sur-Mer — studying under the older painter from 1909 in a relationship that endured until Renoir's death in 1919. Umehara's early canvases are openly Renoir-derived — fleshy nudes in chalky pinks, garden 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 Japan in 1913 and held a well-received first solo exhibition in Tokyo, organised with the support of the Shirakaba literary and art circle. He was among the founders of the Nika-kai (Second Section Society) in 1914, and in 1922 helped establish the Shunyō-kai. From the late 1910s onward he alternated long Paris stays with painting trips through China — particularly Beijing, where between 1939 and 1943 he produced the celebrated Forbidden City paintings for which he is best known — 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 major examples are held at the Artizon Museum (formerly the Bridgestone Museum of Art), the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), and the Hiroshima Museum of Art.

Elected to the Imperial Art Academy in 1935, Umehara was named an Imperial Household Artist and a professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1944. He was awarded Japan's Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō) in 1952 and continued to paint into his nineties, returning again and again to nude studies, Atami coastal views, and Mount Asama. He died on 16 January 1986 in Tokyo at the age of ninety-seven.

Because Umehara died in 1986, his oeuvre remains under copyright in Japan until the end of 2056 under the life-plus-seventy term adopted in 2018, and the same works remain under long US copyright terms as well. As a result there is currently no open-access museum digitisation of an Umehara painting available through the standard open-access pipeline, and he is deferred from image acquisition until a rights-holding institution publishes high-resolution reproductions under a usable open licence.