Portrait of Emperor Kōmei

Portrait of Emperor Kōmei (孝明天皇宸影, 1902), held in the Tokyo National Museum, is the official posthumous portrait that Koyama Shōtarō was commissioned to paint of Emperor Kōmei (1831–1867), the last emperor of the Tokugawa period and the father of Emperor Meiji, almost four decades after the sitter's death. The canvas presents the emperor in formal kuge court robes — a layered black and red costume of the late-Edo aristocratic style, with the lacquered eboshi headdress — modelled in firmly drawn three-quarter view against a dark, evenly lit ground, the face based on the conventional likenesses preserved by the imperial household and the figure painted from period costume studies. The commission belongs to the Meiji imperial programme of constructing a visual genealogy of the modern monarchy, in which official oil portraits of the previous reign were ordered from Western-trained Japanese artists for display in palace ceremonial settings and reproduction in formal publications. Koyama's portrait has the sober, slightly stiff dignity that distinguished his manner from the brighter studio style of Kuroda Seiki, and it was widely reproduced in the early twentieth century as the standard image of Emperor Kōmei. As a document of the moment at which yōga painters were absorbed into the official iconographic apparatus of the imperial state, the painting fixes Koyama's senior public position in the Meiji art world; as a representative of his portrait practice, it is the most carefully preserved and the most accessible of his commissions.