Portrait of Kawakami Tōgai

Held in the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai), Portrait of Kawakami Tōgai is Koyama Shōtarō's small oil-on-canvas tribute to his first teacher, the pioneering yōga painter Kawakami Tōgai (川上冬崖, 1828–1881), painted in or shortly before the year of Tōgai's death. The half-length portrait shows the older painter in dark Western dress with a high collar, his thin face turned slightly to the viewer's left, eyes alert and somewhat melancholy, the modelling carried by firm tonal transitions in the manner Koyama had learned in 1877 from Antonio Fontanesi at the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō. The painting is doubly historical. As a likeness it preserves the features of the man who had, between the 1860s and 1880s, almost single-handedly introduced systematic Western drawing into the late Tokugawa and early Meiji curriculum: Tōgai had taught at the bakufu's Bansho Shirabesho, had run the private Chōkō Dokugakan that gave Koyama his first instruction in Western-style drawing in the 1870s, and had committed suicide in early 1881 in circumstances that have always been read as part of the difficult psychological history of the first generation of yōga painters. As an artwork it is also the founding document of Koyama's own self-conscious lineage — the gesture by which he placed himself, in the new Meiji art world, in continuity with the late-Edo and early-Meiji apprenticeship of his own teacher. It remains the principal portrait of Kawakami Tōgai in the Geidai collection and one of the few intimate documents of the first yōga generation by the second.