Tea Bowl and Fruit

Tea Bowl and Fruit (茶碗と果実), painted by Hayami Gyoshū in 1921, is an early-career still life in color on silk that already shows the precise observational discipline that would drive his later masterpieces. The composition pairs a single Japanese tea bowl — its glazed surface drawn with the exactness of a connoisseur's catalogue entry — with a small arrangement of fruit, set against a neutral ground in the simplified, near-abstract space that Edo bird-and-flower painters had used for the same kind of close-focus subject. Gyoshū's handling of mineral pigments on silk gives both the glaze of the bowl and the soft skin of the fruit their characteristic surface qualities, and the painting reflects the influence of his teacher Matsumoto Fūko's Edo-yamato-e tradition as well as the contemporary nihonga interest in still life as a serious modern subject. The work was painted when Gyoshū was a newly elected full member of the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute) and was actively expanding the repertoire of subjects he was willing to bring to silk; together with Mount Hiei and Kyoto Maiko (both 1920) it documents the moment just before his great masterpieces of the mid- and late 1920s. The Yamatane Museum of Art holds the painting as part of its concentrated Hayami Gyoshū collection, and for students of the artist Tea Bowl and Fruit offers an unusually direct view of how his observational virtuosity was developing in the early Taishō period.