Wada Eisaku

Wada Eisaku (和田英作, 1874-1959) was a central figure in the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa Western-style (yōga) painting establishment in Japan, occupying for more than half a century the institutional posts — president of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, juror of the official Bunten and Teiten exhibitions, founding member of the Hakubakai (White Horse Society), and court painter to the imperial family — through which Western oil painting was consolidated as a national art form. Although his early work belongs to the lyric naturalism of late Meiji yōga, he is principally remembered as a portraitist: his official likenesses of the Meiji statesmen, university chancellors, business leaders and aristocrats of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries form the visual record of the country's first generation of modernisers, and his portrait of Fukuzawa Yukichi remains the canonical image of the founder of Keio University.

Wada was born on 23 December 1874 at Ōsumi in Kagoshima prefecture, the southern Satsuma domain that produced so many of the Meiji oligarchs, and was raised in Tokyo from the age of three after his father's relocation. From an early age he showed an aptitude for drawing and in 1888, aged fourteen, entered the studio of Soyama Yukihiko (1859-1892), a pioneering oil painter who had returned from study in Italy with Antonio Fontanesi. Soyama's death in 1892 forced the young Wada to seek a new teacher, and he was taken in by Hara Bunzō and shortly thereafter by Kuroda Seiki (1866-1924), recently returned from nine years in Paris, where he had studied under Raphaël Collin. Wada entered the Western painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts) in 1896, the year that Kuroda founded the department and inaugurated the gaiyō (bright-palette) plein-air mode that would dominate Meiji yōga. He was therefore among the very first cohort to receive systematic French academic training inside Japan, and his graduation work of 1897 — the great twilight landscape Evening at the Ferry Crossing — established him at twenty-two as the most promising painter of his generation.

In the same year Wada became a founding member of the Hakubakai (White Horse Society), the artists' association around Kuroda that was the institutional centre of late-Meiji yōga and through whose annual exhibitions almost every major Meiji oil painter first showed his work. In 1899 he travelled to Paris on a Ministry of Education scholarship and entered the Académie Colarossi, where he studied under Raphaël Collin himself, the teacher of Kuroda and the source-figure of the entire Tokyo yōga school. He remained in Europe for four years, painting at the artists' colony of Grez-sur-Loing on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where Kuroda and Kume Keiichirō had painted in the 1880s and where the British landscape painter Frank O'Meara, the Swede Carl Larsson and the American William Stott of Oldham had established a tradition of evening river views. His Evening at Grez (1902) is the most fully achieved Japanese contribution to that Grez school. He travelled to Italy and Belgium, joined the Hakubakai's 1900 Paris meeting (recorded in the celebrated group photograph of Kuroda, Kume, Asai Chū, Okada Saburōsuke, Yamashita Shintarō and others), and exhibited at the Paris Salon. He returned to Tokyo in 1903.

On his return Wada was immediately appointed to the faculty of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where he taught oil painting for the next forty years. From 1907 he served as juror at the inaugural Bunten (Ministry of Education exhibition) and at every subsequent Bunten and Teiten, eventually as the senior figure of the Western painting section. In 1909 he was commissioned to paint a copy of the celebrated wall paintings in the Kondō (Golden Hall) of Hōryū-ji, the seventh-century Asuka-period Buddhist murals later destroyed in the 1949 fire that prompted Japan's modern cultural-property protection laws — Wada's copy, made before the fire, has retained an irreplaceable documentary value. From the 1910s onward he received the major mural commissions of the Taishō state: the ceiling paintings of the Imperial Theatre (1911), the murals of Tokyo Station (1914), and the panels for the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery in the new Meiji Shrine Outer Garden, for which he painted the monumental Ceremony for the Promulgation of the Constitution depicting the 11 February 1889 promulgation scene. In 1932 he succeeded Masaki Naohiko as the fourth president of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, an office he held until 1936, and from 1934 served as an official imperial court painter (teishitsu gigeiin).

Wada's portrait practice runs through the entire period and constitutes his largest body of work. He painted Fukuzawa Yukichi (1920) for Keio University, multiple chancellors of Tokyo Imperial University (Koganei Yoshikiyo, Katayama Kunika, Nakano Hatsune, Tanaka Hiroshi), the Meiji statesman Hara Yoshimichi, and the founders of Hitotsubashi University (Ishikawa Bungo, Nasa Tadayuki, Shimono Naotarō). His official portraits established the Japanese institutional convention of the half-length oil portrait of the dark-suited modern gentleman against a neutral ground — a Tokyo equivalent of the contemporaneous American university portraiture of Sargent and Eakins — and they survive in chancellors' offices and university museum collections across Japan. Alongside the portraits he continued to paint flowers (roses became almost a sub-specialty), still lifes, landscapes, particularly of Mount Fuji, which he painted scores of times in his late career, and small lyric figure paintings in the manner of Reading (1902) and Thoughts of Home (1902).

Wada was elected to the Imperial Art Academy in 1937 and received the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō) in 1943. He died in Shizuoka on 3 January 1959, aged 84. His principal holdings are at the Kagoshima City Museum of Art in his home prefecture, the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts at his teaching institution, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT), the Ishibashi Foundation Collection (Artizon Museum and Ishibashi Museum of Art), the Pola Museum of Art, and in the chancellors' offices and museum collections of Keio, Tokyo and Hitotsubashi universities. The Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery in the Meiji Shrine Outer Garden still displays his Constitution mural in its original cycle.