Takeuchi Seiho

• Born: 1864/11/22
• Died: 1942/8/23
• Other Names: 竹内恒吉 (Takeuchi Tsunekichi)
• Japanese: 竹内栖鳳 (Takeuchi Seihou)

Takeuchi Seihô was a prominent Kyoto Nihonga painter, perhaps most famous for his monochrome ink landscapes incorporating the realism of Western oil painting; however, Seihô was a prolific artist with a varied oeuvre, including not only ink landscapes with Western realism, but also full-color bijinga in a neo-ukiyo-e mode, ceramics, bronze sculpture, paintings on kimono, among other modes and subjects.

He taught students in his private studio for roughly forty years, and taught at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts for roughly thirty; his students included Tsuchida Bakusen, Uemura Shôen, and Nishiyama Suishô, who would each go on to become prominent Nihonga painters in their own right.

Childhood

He was born Takeuchi Tsunekichi and raised in Kyoto, taking on the art-name Seihô later in life. Tsunekichi's father Masashichi owned a seafood restaurant known as the Kameya, which was frequented mainly by artisans from the nearby Nishijin textiles district, and by officials whose offices surrounded Nijô castle. The family's home was just behind the restaurant, a rather typical arrangement for family businesses in early modern Japan.

Young Tsunekichi, his parents' only son, was weak and sickly, suffering from chronic stomach problems. His mother died when he was twelve and a half, after which he was raised by his maternal grandmother, until she died in 1888. Tsunekichi's sole sister helped their father run the restaurant, leaving young Tsunekichi free to focus on his hobbies and interests.

He attended terakoya (temple school) for the standard five years or so, and received some additional tutoring in Chinese literature, but otherwise received no further formal education. Some textile designers and other artists who frequented the restaurant aided him in learning to draw, and otherwise inspired his artistic interests and pursuits. Tsunekichi began more formally studying painting in spring 1877, at the age of 14, under a distant relative named Tsuchida Eirin. Eirin was a designer of yûzen dyed goods, and held painting classes in his home. Eirin drew upon Shijô school materials and methods in training his students, emphasizing close observation of nature, the use of model skeetchbooks (tehon), and the keeping of one's own sketchbooks, prepared in part by sketching birds and plants from life (shasei).

Career

Seihô began studying under Kôno Bairei in 1881, joining roughly seventy other students receiving private lessons from Bairei. Most of these students, like Seihô, had family connections to Nishijin and/or the textiles industry.

Through Bairei, Seihô first began to move in Kyoto's more elite artistic circles, meeting many of the most prominent professional painters in the city. Only two years after beginning to teach Seihô, Bairei in 1883 assigned him to help those students who were having difficulty, and shortly afterwards secured a position for Seihô to teach formally at the Kyoto Prefecture Painting School which Bairei helped establish in 1880. Bairei also helped Seihô get his work shown at formal exhibitions, but at first it did not attract much attention; Bairei also took Seihô along with him on various high-end commissions, including one when Bairei produced records of a Higashi Honganji abbot's journeys in the Hokuriku region.

Seihô married Takayama Nami, the daughter of Takayama Ihei, a Nishijin textile merchant, in August 1887, and moved into a house across the street from his father's restaurant, which his father paid to have built. On this occasion, Bairei declared Seihô no longer a student, and now an independent painter in his own right. Embarking on his own, Seihô began acquiring patrons not only from among local Kyoto merchants, but also among those from the nearby provinces, who traveled into Kyoto regularly to settle accounts; one of his more major contacts came about through his wife, Nami, who was close friends with the wife of Iida Tôjirô, who headed Takashimaya's studio for artists. Seihô produced numerous designs for Takashimaya tapestries and other high-end textiles, including some which were produced on commission from the Imperial Household.

Seihô made his first and only trip to Europe in 1900-1901. While there, he tried his hand at oil painting, and developed a fondness in particular for the works of JMW Turner and Barbizon school painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

After his return, he focused for a time on the production of byôbu (folding screen) paintings aimed at commercial sale, in order to help fund the purchase of instructional materials for his teaching practice. Continuing his relationship with Takashimaya, and active involvement in Kyoto's art world, he produced designs for two textile pieces which ended up winning Takashimaya first prize at the 1903 Fifth Domestic Exposition in Osaka. These were an embroidered wall hanging depiction a lion, and a design of Mt. Fuji which accompanied works by Tsuji Kakô and Yamamoto Shunkyô depicting, respectively, a scene in Switzerland, and Niagara Falls, as a "views of scenes around the world" triptych. The three artists were later commissioned by Takashimaya to produce another triptych on the same theme; this one included one of Seihô's most famous works, "Moon over Venice," depicting the Grand Canal in Venice in a style reminiscent of JMW Turner, but employing traditional Japanese ink painting media. The yûzen pieces based on these designs were shown at the Japan-British Exhibition in London in 1910.

Though his works vary greatly, in many of his works, Seihô is said to have "liked to work with a limited palate [sic] of subtle gradation and relied upon the tactile quality of the picture plane to animate the surface and enliven the scene." Combining the brushwork style of the Maruyama-Shijô schools of traditional ink painting with elements of Western painting methods, he created his own distinct style for painting landscapes and other subjects.

Always quite prominent and active in the Kyoto art world, Seihô regularly served as a jury member for the Bunten from its establishment in 1907 onwards, and earned numerous awards for his own works at various exhibitions. He was named an Imperial Household Artist in 1914, and was commissioned by the Imperial Household Agency to produce a pair of screens commemorating the coronation of the Taishô Emperor.

Seihô received high praise from Kaburaki Kiyotaka, a prominent Tokyo painter in his own right; Kiyotaka is quoted as saying "In today's painting world, if we were to find a meijin (master artist), it can be no one but Seihô. ... There is a good chance that Seihô is the very last meijin."

He built a house near the temple of Kôdai-ji in Kyoto's Higashiyama district in 1929, and in 1937, along with Yokoyama Taikan, became one of the first two Nihonga artists to be awarded the Order of Cultural Merit. He died five years later.

References

• Conant, Ellen. "Cut from Kyoto Cloth: Takeuchi Seihô and his Artistic Milieu." Impressions 33 (2012). pp71-93.
• "Takeuchi Seihô." Digital-ban Nihon jinmei daijiten デジタル版 日本人名大辞典. Kodansha, 2009.