Yamamoto Hōsui

Yamamoto Hōsui (山本芳翠, 1850-1906) was a pioneering early-Meiji yōga (Western-style) painter whose decade of study in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme made him one of the first Japanese artists to absorb academic oil painting at its source. His career bridges the experimental first-generation yōga of Takahashi Yuichi and the establishment of Western painting as an institutional discipline by Kuroda Seiki — a transition in which Hōsui himself was instrumental, both as a teacher and through the private painting school he transferred to Kuroda in 1894.

He was born Yamamoto Tanaji on 12 August 1850 in Akechi, in the mountains of Mino Province (today Ena District, Gifu Prefecture). He studied first in the literati Nanga manner with the local Kanō-school painter Asai Iyoka and, from 1868, with the Nagoya Nanga master Hirai Hyakusen, before moving to Yokohama in 1869 to seek Western training. There he studied with the Anglo-Japanese illustrator Charles Wirgman of The Illustrated London News and entered the studio of Goseda Hōryū (1827-1892), an early pioneer of yōga who had also taught the young Goseda Yoshimatsu. In 1872 Hōsui joined the Western painting department of the Technical Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō) in Tokyo when it opened in 1876 under the Italian Realist Antonio Fontanesi, the foundational figure of academic oil painting instruction in Japan.

In 1878 Hōsui sailed for Europe, settling in Paris where he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts and entered the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the most celebrated academic masters of the late nineteenth century. He remained in France for roughly a decade, becoming the most thoroughly trained academic painter of his generation of Japanese yōga and exhibiting at the Paris Salon. Hōsui moved in the artistic and literary circles of fin-de-siècle Paris: he became a friend and frequent guest of the Count Robert de Montesquiou, the dandy and aesthete on whom Huysmans modelled Des Esseintes, and provided pen-and-ink illustrations and decorative motifs for Montesquiou's privately printed verse, including the 1885 leaflet 'Séndaté — La mort du samouraï.' He also befriended Kawakami Otojirō and other Japanese expatriates and collaborated with the engraver Gōda Kiyoshi (1862-1938) on the celebrated wood-engraved view of the 1888 eruption of Mount Bandai.

Hōsui returned permanently to Tokyo around 1888 and immediately became a central figure in the institutional consolidation of yōga. In 1889 he co-founded the Meiji Bijutsukai (Meiji Fine Arts Society), the first organisation of Western-style painters in Japan, where he exhibited his major paintings of the 1890s. He opened a private painting school in Tokyo, the Seikōkan, modelled on the European atelier system, which served as the principal training ground for the next generation of yōga painters before Kuroda Seiki's return from Paris in 1893. In 1894, in one of the formative gestures of late-Meiji painting, Hōsui handed the school to Kuroda and Kume Keiichirō, who renamed it the Tenshin Dōjō and transformed it into the seedbed of Kuroda's plein-air, gaiyō (bright-palette) manner that would dominate yōga for the next two decades.

The culmination of Hōsui's painting career was the Jūnishi (十二支, Twelve Earthly Branches) cycle of 1892, twelve large-scale academic oil paintings based on the animal signs of the Chinese-Japanese zodiac. Ten of the twelve survive, divided among the Imperial Household Agency, the Tokyo University of the Arts University Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The cycle exemplifies Hōsui's distinctive synthesis: Gérôme's polished classical surface and figural structure placed in the service of Japanese mythological and astronomical subjects, in this case the legend of the Weaver (Vega) and the Cowherd (Altair) that gives the Tanabata festival its name. His 1895 Urashima-zu, shown at the seventh Meiji Bijutsukai exhibition and now an Important Cultural Property at the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, applied the same procedure to the most familiar of Japanese folktales.

Hōsui died in Tokyo on 15 November 1906, aged fifty-six. His reputation lies less in any single painting than in his role as the principal transmitter of Parisian academic training to early-Meiji Japan and as the teacher whose school became, under Kuroda, the institutional foundation of modern Japanese oil painting. The principal collections of his work are at the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu — which holds the Important Cultural Properties Rafu (Nude, 1880) and Urashima-zu (1895) — together with the Tokyo University of the Arts University Art Museum, the Kanagawa Prefectural History Museum, the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, and the Imperial Household Agency.