FAH262H1 Chap.4 Yoga and Nihonga in Meiji Japan

Yoga and Nihonga in Meiji Japan

Readings and texts for the week

Week 4 pairs two chapters from the volume Since Meiji.

Emiko Yamanashi's survey of Western-style painting in four stages opens Part I, alongside a primary text the class annotates, Shiba Kokan's Discussing Western Painting of 1799. Ellen Conant's revisionist chapter on painting from Edo to Meiji opens Part II, with John Clark's Formation of the Neotraditional (1998) as the conceptual reading.

For Shiba Kokan, Inaga's Week 3 article supplies one detail: in 1799 he rendered perspective as a principle of far and near.

The syllabus heading dates the topic to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the term calendar frames it as Meiji, 1868 to 1912.

Inside Yamanashi's middle stages

Fontanesi went home ill in 1878, and his replacement disappointed the students; Yamanashi names him Ferletti and counts eleven who left to form the Association of Eleven, Asai Chu among them, while Conant speaks of a dozen.

During the 1880s official enthusiasm for Western art cooled, and Western-mode works were kept out of the national painting exhibitions of 1882 and 1884. After the 1889 constitution, history painting in oils flourished, and the 1890 exposition prompted a public argument: Toyama Masakazu preferred scenes of ordinary life, Mori Ogai answered that style, not subject, should decide a painting's worth, and the dealer Hayashi Tadamasa doubted the painters' skill.

Kuroda Seiki's programme

Kuroda left for Paris in 1884 intending to read law, turned to painting with Raphael Collin, and came back in 1893 after nine years.

He wanted grand compositions on lasting themes and believed figures should be nude so that dress would not tie them to one era. That collided with a government ban on public nudity issued in 1873 to avoid looking uncivilised to Westerners, and his nude drew complaints at the Kyoto exposition of 1895, although the jury declined to remove it.

He taught at the Tokyo school from 1896, led the Hakubakai, and sat on the jury of the government exhibition from its start in 1907 until he died in 1924. Yamanashi credits him with raising both the style and the social standing of oil painting.

Conant against the canon

Conant sets out four premises she says historians inherited from Fenollosa and Okakura: late Edo decline, a Westernising state that endangered tradition, Hogai and Gaho as typical victims, and rescue through the Tokyo School of Fine Arts.

She contests each, mainly by recovering painters such as Shiokawa Bunrin, whose studies of light and atmosphere may have prompted the hazy style later urged on Okakura's pupils.

Much of Hogai's biography, she reports via Hiroko McDermott, was assembled after his death; Okakura is described as a middling bureaucrat whose ablest pupils came through prior ties to the faculty; and the closure of the first art school is traced to Ministry of Education officials rather than to a lecture.

Keeping categories honest

Matsushima offers the institutional view: Kuroda pressed a system modelled on French academies and painted from the living body, while traditional training had relied on copying earlier works.

Conant reminds you that labels lag behind lives. Shibata Zeshin trained as both lacquer artist and painter, which defeats any neat division between fine art and craft, and many so-called yoga pioneers kept painting in traditional styles. Use yoga and nihonga as historical categories with founders and dates, not as timeless kinds of painting.

When sources disagree on a date, as they do for Okakura's birth, the Tokyo school's founding and Taikan's death, say so in the answer. Conant also credits Taikan's hold on the revived Japan Art Institute to administrative skill rather than to a large following of pupils.

What this chapter covers

• 01

  Technical Fine Arts School, 1876 to 1883

• 02

  Fenollosa's 1882 lecture and the Kanga-kai

• 03

  Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Japan Art Institute

• 04

  Yamanashi's four stages of Western-style painting

• 05

  Kuroda Seiki, the nude and the Hakubakai

• 06

  The Bunten and its three divisions

• 07

  Conant's challenge to the Fenollosa and Okakura narrative

Worked example · free

Weigh Conant's challenge to the standard Meiji narrative

Key terms

Technical Fine Arts School

Japan's first school of Western art, opened by the Ministry of Industry in 1876 with Italian teachers and closed in 1883.

Hakubakai

White Horse Society: the yoga group Kuroda Seiki and allied painters formed in 1896, linked to bright colour brought from France.

Kosoga

Grand scale painting: Kuroda's ideal of large historical compositions with posed figure groups expressing lasting values such as love, peace or courage.

Gofun

A white pigment made from shell powder, on the nihonga key-term list and used with ink, colour and gold on Kishi Chikudo's screens.

Bunten

The annual government exhibition begun in 1907 on the model of the French Salon, divided into Japanese-style painting, Western-style painting and sculpture.

Yoga and Nihonga in Meiji Japan FAQ

Exam move

Redraw the institution timeline from memory with founders and dates, then place five painters on Yamanashi's four stages and on one side of the yoga and nihonga divide, noting one source conflict for each date you use.