Yamamoto Shunkyo

Yamamoto Shunkyo (1871-1933) was one of the central figures of Meiji- and Taishō-period Kyoto painting: a Shijō-school landscapist by training, a court painter (Teishitsu Gigeiin) from 1917, a founding juror of the government's Bunten exhibition, and the artist most identified with the painted record of Lake Biwa and the alpine valleys of central Japan. Working at the moment when the Kyoto painting world was redefining itself in dialogue with the new institutions of Meiji Tokyo, with Western yōga, and with the modern habits of plein-air sketching, Shunkyo produced a body of work that married the Maruyama-Shijō tradition of close observation he had inherited from Mori Kansai and Kōno Bairei with a personal feeling for atmosphere, weather, and the experience of walking in mountains. His pair of six-panel screens Recesses of Shiobara (1909, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo) is one of the canonical landscape paintings of late Meiji nihonga and a designated Important Cultural Property in the modern Japanese painting canon.

Shunkyo was born in 1871 in Sakamoto, on the western shore of Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture, into a Tendai Buddhist temple household associated with the Hiyoshi Taisha shrine complex at the foot of Mount Hiei. The lake, the mountain, and the seasonal weather of the Hira and Hiei ranges along the western shore would remain at the center of his imagination throughout his career, and he returned to Lake Biwa subjects in screens, scrolls, and Bunten exhibition pieces from his earliest student work into his last years. In 1882, at age eleven, he was sent to Kyoto to study painting under Mori Kansai (1814-1894), the leading representative of the late Maruyama-Shijō school in nineteenth-century Kyoto and a major painter of birds, flowers, and the gentle landscape mode that the Shijō school had developed from Maruyama Ōkyo's late eighteenth-century shasei (sketching from life) practice. Under Kansai he received the art name Shunkyo (春挙, "spring-raised"), absorbed the Shijō repertoire of subjects (waterfalls, pines, mountain rivers, mist-bound valleys, the four seasons in landscape), and learned the school's characteristic discipline of beginning a landscape from sustained outdoor observation rather than from copies of older masters alone.

After Kansai's death in 1894, Shunkyo continued his studies under Kōno Bairei (1844-1895), the great Kyoto bird-and-flower painter and senior instructor at the new Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyōto Furitsu Gagakkō, founded 1880). Bairei occupied a peculiarly central place in late-nineteenth-century Kyoto: founder of the Kyoto Young Painters' Society, juror at the major national painting competitions, and the teacher of an entire generation that would dominate Kyoto nihonga into the Taishō and early Shōwa periods, including Takeuchi Seihō (1864-1942), Tsuji Kakō (1870-1931), Kikuchi Hōbun, Taniguchi Kōkyō, and Shunkyo himself. Bairei's death the following year left this informal cohort of pupils to define the next phase of Kyoto painting; Shunkyo, slightly younger than Seihō, took on the role of the cohort's principal landscape specialist, where Seihō was its principal animal painter and Kakō its most adventurous experimentalist.