Five Painted Lacquer-on-Wood Plates (with Taniguchi Kōkyō, Tsuji Kakō, and Yamamoto Shunkyo)

Five Painted Lacquer-on-Wood Plates is a collaborative decorative set produced around 1910 by four senior pupils of Kōno Bairei — Taniguchi Kōkyō, Tsuji Kakō, Kikuchi Hōbun, and Yamamoto Shunkyo — now held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 2001-03-011). The set is a characteristic product of the Kyoto Shijō second generation in the late Meiji period: the four painters who together carried the Bairei lineage into the twentieth century collaborated on decorative commissions in lacquer, ceramics, and embroidered textiles in addition to their primary work in scroll and screen painting, and the resulting objects — most of which combine the four painters' brush styles on a single piece — survive in collections around the Pacific Rim as documents of the close working relationship that bound the Kyoto Shijō establishment in the years on either side of 1910. The painted lacquer plates deploy each painter's specialty across the set: bird-and-flower subjects from Hōbun and Kōkyō, landscape from Shunkyo, and the more freely brushed figure and animal subjects from Tsuji Kakō. The Honolulu Museum's set entered the collection in the early twenty-first century and is one of the principal extant documents of the four-painter collaborative tradition.