Fruit

Fruit (Kajitsu, 1910) is one of Kokei's earliest excursions away from the historical figure subjects on which he made his name and toward the bird-and-flower and still-life themes that would absorb him in middle age. Painted on paper in soft ink and colour, the picture arranges a small group of seasonal fruit — typically read as persimmons and figs — on a near-empty ground, with each object outlined in the precise, unhurried brush he had been refining under Kajita Hanko. The work is significant for the way it carries the classical kachō tradition of Edo painting forward without becoming either decorative or sentimental: the fruit are observed with a slightly cool, almost botanical attentiveness, and the composition leaves so much paper empty that the eye is forced to read the picture as much in terms of placement and breath as in terms of subject. It is held today in the collection of the Yamatane Museum of Art, Tokyo, where it sits alongside major Taishō nihonga as an early indication of where Kokei's late style would eventually settle.