Haniwa (Left Panel)

Haniwa (Left Panel) is one half of a 1916 pair of hanging scrolls by Tsuji Kakō in ink and color on paper, depicting haniwa — the unglazed clay figures that lined the Kofun-period burial mounds of ancient Japan from roughly the third through the sixth centuries. By the early twentieth century haniwa had become a significant subject of antiquarian and nationalist interest in Japan: late Meiji and Taishō archaeologists, including the staff of the Imperial Household's Office of Antiquities, were systematically cataloguing the figures, while painters were taking them up as emblems of an indigenous Japanese antiquity older than the imported Buddhist and Chinese cultural inheritance. Kakō's drawing of the left-panel figures reflects the Maruyama-Shijō observation he had absorbed from his teacher Kōno Bairei: each haniwa is rendered with attention to its individual posture, proportions, and weathered surface, set against the controlled negative space and soft outline that the school favored. As an example of the early twentieth-century nihonga engagement with archaeological subject matter, the scroll occupies a distinctive place in his work and within the broader history of Japanese antiquarian painting.