JAPAN -- Meiji & Taisho Eras
(1869 to 1912)
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The Work:
Kabuki Actors
is an 1876 triptych with five actors portrayed. Near the lower right edge
of the right-most panel, a small/medium pine tree is in what appears to
be a white cloth-draped dark wooden bucket. A red lobster rests against
the brown trunk and green pine needle bunches. The lobster was a
symbol of old age because of its crooked back.
The Artist: Toyohara Kunichika. 1 The Work: Kifujin No Tashinami ( Contributor's Taste ?) A tryptych of six noblewomen has two bonsai towards the left side. The first bonsai is a tall and thin neagari style pine (?) in a shallow blue oval pinched-neck pot with three feet. To the right of this, and now in the middle section of the tryptych, is a shallow blue rectangular pot with white corner feet holding what appears to be a cave rock. Longer vertical, the oval stone with the large opening has a distinct apex as well as a wider base. Behind it in the same container is perhaps an accessory plant.
The Artist:
Toshu Shogetsu (fl. 1889) 2
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The Work: Meeting for Peace Negotiations is a triptych showing the Japanese on the left separated from the Chinese on the right by the negotiating table at Shunpanro Restaurant, April 1895. A large tray landscape in the center panel sits on the rear edge of the large red cloth-covered table. A gray barked pine (equivalent to a meter high?) is shown with rocks and iris-like-leaved flowers in a broad tray which might have been only 1 cm deep. (Perhaps the landscape is resting on something to the right of the main table.) This is said to be the better of two versions done of the subject by the artist. The Artist: Kiyochika (b. Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1847-1915) was an independent from Edo who was influenced by imported lithographs and etchings, and thus turned to woodblock printing. He had a considerable success, particularly between 1876 and 1881, but after that the style in which he worked lost its popularity. He was also a book, magazine and newspaper illustrator. His prints contained views of contemporary Tokyo as it changed under the impact of Western influence. 3 The Work: First Month: The Sleeping Dragon Plum at Kameido is a triptych from Views of the Famous Places of Tokyo, c.February 1896. The sharp lines and areas of solid color characteristic of the Ukiyo-e tradition are gone, and the print has become virtually a replication of Japanese-style painting. In the lower right corner of the right-most panel, a young Japanese girl and her European-garbed father are viewing two bonsai under a covered porch. On a low raised stand in a pale blue bowl is a red-berried plum tree. On a mat in a slightly larger pot at the print's edge is larger plum. The background scene is of plum-blossom viewing at Plum Estate (Umeyashiki) in Kameido in eastern Tokyo. Some forty other people, in mixed culture clothing/warm winter dress, are milling around or are at low mat-covered tables not far from a lake's edge. The Subject: The Sleeping Dragon Plum, a tree right of the triptych's center, is surrounded by a low fence and marked with a plaque. It was the single most famous tree in Tokyo. The ancient plum was known for the habit of sending roots into the ground from its descending branches, which would then rise in turn as new shoots, giving an overall contour of a reclining dragon. The tree was badly damaged by a great flood in 1910. It survived until the 1920s. The Artist: Kiyochika. 4 The Work: An untitled painting dated to 1890 is located over the doorway of the Inn Mantei in the Gion quarter of Kyoto. The silk background has turned brown with age and the black ink is smudged and misty. This work shows a double-trunk pine in a low rectangular pot, some utensils nearby, and large leaf, and a poem inscribed in the upper right. The similarity between the two trees planted side by side might be faulted as too much sameness in height, trunk size, and even to the number of branches. But the lines in the trunks and branches have been combined into a beautiful linear arrangement.
The Artist:
Tessai (b. Tomioka Hyakuren, 1837-1924)
was one of the most renowned artists in Japanese history. He painted
in the so-called "Literary Men's Style," employed by Chinese artists of
the Tang dynasty. Occasionally he even included Chinese poems in
his own paintings. But he was not a slavish copier of the soft and
shaded Chinese style of painting, the artists of which he admired both
for their manner of painting and their lofty ideas. He shared with
them their love of untouched nature represented often by very free brush
strokes for which Tessai became famous.
The Work: A Pleasant Life in a Gourd (1923) is noted here because it is a late depiction of a very early theme in this history .
The Artist:
Tessai.
6 The Work: A work in the "Akawa-ma" series from 1896 published by Fukuda Hatsujiro. A woman in a kimono bearing a boat on water pattern looks down to her left at a bonsai resting on a short orange table. The tree(s), container and table are only partially shown at the woodblock print's right edge. The ornate round, wide, blue-and-white pot contains a stone with at least two different types of trees. There is a pine and some type of flowering deciduous plant.
The Artist:
Yoshua Chikanobu (1838-1912), born in Niigata Prefecture as Hashimoto
Tadayoshia, was trained in Kano School painting and then was a
student of Utagawa Kuniyoshi and later of Toyohara Kunichika, who gave
him his artist's name. He began producing designs in the classic
manner of the woodcut masters around 1870, concentrating upon both
portrayals of beautiful women and scenes from Japanese legend and
folklore. He made his artistic reputation in the 1880's with
triptychs illustrating political events of the Meiji period, depictions
of the Imperial family, contemporary warfare, the pleasures of the
noble courts, scenes from the Noh theatre, and customs and manners of a
changing Japan. His later art (particularly those woodcuts
relating to the theatre) are remarkable for their bold design elements
and beautiful printing techniques. With the exception of
Yoshitoshi, his style was perhaps more individualistic than any other
Japanese woodcut artist of the times.
7
__________
The Work:
Plum Bonsai.
A zig-zagging-trunked pink-blooming plum rises out of its tall
blue-and-white pot with feet. What appears to be a type of
long-handled hand trowel rests just to the right diagonally at the base
of that pot. To the left and behind this pot is a shorter
brown-and-white container holding what may be an adonis plant.
Each container has a wide lip.
A turning point in Takahashi's career came in 1907, when he began to design woodblock prints as the first artist for the Watanabe Shozaburo publishing company. His early prints were signed 'Shotei', the art name he took around 1902. Around 1921, Takahashi changed his artist's name to 'Hiroaki', occasionally using the name 'Komei'. His prints have a great variety of seals and signatures, which sometimes makes identification difficult. All his blocks -- some 500 -- under the go Shotei were destroyed during the great Kanto earthquake and ensuing in September 1923. Over the following years, Takahashi continued to work for Watanabe, creating between 150 and 250 new designs. These prints included a variety of greeting cards and small landscapes remarkably similar to his earlier designs, derived stylistically from ukiyo-e designs. However, Takahashi did create many striking prints in a more modern style. Shin hanga literally means New Prints. It was an art movement for a new style of Japanese prints from about 1910 until ca. 1960. Shin hanga took the art of ukiyo-e to a new renaissance. The shin hanga movement integrated Western elements without giving up the old values of Japanese, traditional woodblock prints. Instead of blindly imitating Western art styles, the new movement concentrated on traditional subjects like landscapes, beautiful women and actor portraits. Inspired by European Impressionism the artists introduced the effects of light and the expression of individual moods. The result was a technically superb and compelling new style of Japanese prints. During the 1930's, Takahashi began working with Fusui Gabo, a lesser known Tokyo publisher. It is speculated that this relationship allowed Takahashi more freedom, as Watanabe's business was limited by conservative Western tastes. Perhaps because his designs vary so widely in their style and originality, Takahashi Shotei remains one of the most under-appreciated shin hanga artists. 8 |
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1. Seen by RJB at a vendor's display of woodblock prints at the February 1992 Phoenix Matsuri Festival; cf. the lobster and non-bonsai pine in Hokkei's Choko Chorei, c.1825, b&w fig. 126 on pg. 218 of Mirviss, Joan B. The Frank Lloyd Wright Collection of Surimono ; (New York: Weatherhill, Inc. and Phoenix, AZ: Phoenix Art Museum; 1995). The motif, to a less extent, can also be found in Hokkei's A Set for the Hanazona Group, early 1820s (Keyes, Surimono, Fig. 17 color, pg. 57, caption on pg. 56); Hokkei's New Year's Arrangement, late 1810s (Mirviss, small b&w Fig. 99, pg. 209); or Hokusai's Woman with a New Year Arrangement, 1797 (Mirviss, small b&w Fig. 150, pg. 226).
2.
"Dr. Horace F. Clay & 'Walking Mangrove',"
http://www.fukubonsai.com/5a9.html. A small version is also to be found on pg. 15 of the January/February 2000 issue of
Bonsai, BCI.
3. Roberts, Laurance
P.
A Dictionary of Japanese Artists
(Tokyo: John Weatherhill, Inc.; 1976), pg. 85;
Peace Meeting from Allen Adler & Ruth Leserman Collection, #99, seen at Phoenix Art Museum, c.late 1980s;
4.
First Month
seen at Phoenix Art Museum, c.late 1980s;
Smith, Henry D. II
Kiyochika, Artist of Meiji Japan
(Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art; 1988);
cf. Du Cane, Florence
The Flowers and Gardens of Japan
(London: Adam & Charles Black; 1908), pp. 112-113:
5.
Index of Japanese Painters, compiled by the Society of Friends of Eastern Art
(
Toyo Bijutsu Kokusai Kenkyukai
) (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company; 1940.
First Tuttle edition published 1958), pg. 120;
Moore, Lamont “Bonsai and the 47th Ronin,” Bonsai Journal, ABS, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1971, pp. 8-9, 18, b&w photo on pg. 8, which also contains the following: The Inn Mantei is noteworthy because it was here that Oishi Yoshio in 1702 or 1703 visited, reveled, and squandered his money away. This was to give the impression that he was a frivolous wastrel when actually he and his forty-six companions – the 47 Ronin -- were furiously plotting to avenge an insult to their master. After completing their mission, they were forced to commit suicide. More than two hundred and fifty years later, guests at the Inn were assembling as their forefathers had assembled on each anniversary of Yoshio's death to pay tribute to his memory.
6. Stein, Rolf A.
The World in Miniature: Container Gardens and Dwellings in Far Eastern Religious Thought
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; 1990), Fig.
27,
pg. 59.
7.
"Yoshu Chikanobu,"
http://www.artoftheprint.com/artistpages/chikanobu_yoshu_tavellerinthesnow.htm
; "Fine Chikanobu Triptych 'King Gusan', c.1880,"
http://www.antiqnet.com/detail,chikanobu-triptych-king,694539.html
; See "Chikanobu -- 'Beauty in Silver Kimono',"
http://www.ukiyoe-gallery.com/detail-b86.htm
for series.
That
print may also have a bonsai, as opposed to a
ikebana
arrangement. We need to get a better copy of it. RJB's
contrast manipulation experiments of this image are inconclusive.
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