Nakagawa Kigen 中川紀元 (1892-1972), 1941. Ink and pigment on paper, 238 x 77.5 cm., hanging scroll, signed box, ivory jikusaki. Inscription reads: "A nation forever to exist. Since the earth was made, now in its 2600th year. Kigen."

One of the major innovators of the Taisho and early Showa periods, Kigen is known as the artist who introduced Fauvism to Japan. He was born in Nagano Prefecture and briefly attended the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Between 1919 and 1921, he lived in France, where he studied under Henri Matisse and Andre Lhote. Later, he formed the avant-garde group Action and published studies of Matisse and Picasso.

He continued to exhibit after the war, and in 1964 received the Imperial Prize from the Japan Art Academy. His work is housed in many museum collections in Japan, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo. In 1992, to mark the centennial of his birth, a retrospective of his work was held at the Shoto Museum of Art and the Tetsuno Art Museum. 

Though he worked primarily in oil, Kigen produced paintings in the Japanese style throughout his career. Given its patriotic subject matter and inscription, its not surprising that this unusually large hanging scroll—painted in a free, cartoonish style—dates from his tenure as a navy war painter, when he was stationed in Shanghai and Nanjing. 

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Attributed to Kobayashi Kokei 小林古径 (1883-1957), Autumn Landscape with Ox Herder, circa early Showa Period. Pigment on silk, hanging scroll, 142.5 x 57.5 cm., antler jikusaki, box. Signed Kokei.

Kobayashi Kokei's elegant simplification of form lent his paintings a lucidity and clarity of line that remain exemplary. He was born in Niigata Prefecture and, by the time he was thirteen, lost both parents and his eldest brother, afterwards living with relatives and using his inheritance to pay for painting lessons and supplies. In 1899 he moved to Tokyo, to attend the painting academy of the historical painter Kajita Hanko (1870-1917). It was there that he met fellow student Maeda Seison (1885-1977), who became a lifelong friend.

Kokei had already won a number of awards for his historical paintings when, in 1910, he joined Imamura Shiko (1880-1916) and Yasuda Yukihiko (1884-1978) in forming the Koji-kai, a group that would advance a new style of Nihonga. He also became a member of Okakura Tenshin's Japan Art Institute and exhibited a painting at the 1910 Japan-British Exposition in London. In 1922, he and Seison spent a year abroad, visiting Egypt, Paris and London, where for nearly a month they copied the British Museum's famous 4th-century Chinese scroll, Admonitions of the Instructress.

On his return, Kokei became an administrator of the reorganized Japan Art Institute and a leading member of the Tokyo artworld. In 1944 he began teaching at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts; he was appointed an Imperial Household Artist and, in 1950, won the Order of Culture. Kokei's work is housed in many major public collections, including those of the Tokyo National Museum, the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto, and the Yokohama Museum of Art. The Kobayashi Kokei Memorial Museum of Art opened in the artist's native city of Joetsu in 2005.

In this unusual, otherworldly Taisho-era landscape, the brilliant hues of the foliage and the repeating pattern of the trees are taken from rimpa, whereas the high point of view belongs to literati painting, all components of Kokei's eclectic vision. 

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Tales of Ise (Akutagawa) by Tamamura Hokuto 玉村方久斗 (1893–1951), circa mid-20s. Ink and pigment on gilt silk, hanging scroll, 139 x 45 cm. Signed Hokuto.

A singular figure in the Japanese avant-garde, Tamamura Hokuto was born in the central ward of Kyoto to a family that owned a shop that sold geta, the traditional wooden sandal. He attended the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and the Kyoto Municipal Fine Arts College, where he studied with Kikuchi Hobun (1862-1918). In 1915, with classmates Okamoto Shinso (1894-1933), Kainosho Tadaoto (1894-1978), and Irie Hako (1887-1948), he founded a forward-looking Nihonga group called Mitsuritsu-kai.

After showing his work in several of the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibitions and moving to Tokyo, in 1918 Hokuto won the Inten's Chogyu Prize for a set of startlingly modern picture scrolls based on Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu Monogotari). He recreated them again in 1923, after the originals were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake. During this period he made many paintings based on traditional Japanese texts such as Tale of Genji and Tales of Ise. 

As the Taisho period came to an end, Hokuto lost interest in conventional Nihonga, devoting himself to avant-garde movements such as Daiichi Sakka Domei (D.S.D.), Sanka, and Tan’i Sanka (Unit Sanka). He exhibited three-dimensional works (now lost) said to resemble those of Vladimir Tatlin; inspired by the Constructivists, he sometimes signed his works with a Russified version of his birth name, Zennosuke, styling himself Zenofskey. With the help of his patron, Yoshida Nobukata of the Isshiki Kappan Printing Company, he founded the experimental art journals Epoch and GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM (G.G.P.G.). In 1930, he founded an art association named after himself—Hokuto-sha. A prolific printmaker and painter, Hokuto eventually turned his attention to contemporary everyday scenes, rendered in a grotesque and humorous style. 

Recent interest in Hokuto's work culminated in Tamamura Hokuto: Revolutionary of Japanese-Style Painting, a retrospective held in 2008 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, as well as a career-spanning monograph. 

This scene from Tales of Ise is nearly identical to a hanging scroll, dated 1925-27, that was exhibited as part of Tamamura Hokuto: Revolutionary of Japanese-Style Painting in 2008.

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Yuki Somei 結城素明 (1875-1957), Landscape with Waterfall and Fisherman. Ink and pigment on silk, hanging scroll, ivory jikusaki, signed box. Signed Somei.

A magisterial figure in the Tokyo art world, Yuki Somei studied with Kawabata Gyokusho (1842-1913) and graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1897. He painted Western-style oil paintings early in his career and, while still a student, exhibited with the important cultural group Nihongakai. His work was included regularly in government-sposored Bunten exhibitions and honored with many awards.

Somei helped to establish the Museikai artists' society in 1900 with the painter and poet Hirafuku Hyakusui (1877-1933) and other former students of Kawabata Gyokusho. This group was devoted to naturalism and did not adhere to the romanticism practiced by the rival Japan Art Institute of Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913). In 1917 Somei organized the Kinreisha group, and frequently served as a judge at the government-sposored Teiten exhibition. He lived in Europe from 1923-25, then returned to Japan to teach at his alma mater. Somei's work can be found in many public collections in Japan, including those of the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto.

Somei often blended Western influences into traditional depictions of Japanese subjects, a tendency especially apparent in this unusual, nearly abstract landscape, where the artist renders foliage and falling water with strokes of red, yellow and blue. A fisherman provides the landscape's sole naturalistic detail.

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Morita Tsunetomo 森田恒友 (1888-1933), Landscape with Mt. Fuji, 27 x 24 cm, circa early 1930s. Ink and pigment on silk, hanging scroll, ivory jikusaki, signed and sealed box. Signed Tsunetomo.

Morita Tsunetomo was already an accomplished painter when he visited France in 1914 and fell under the spell of Paul Cezanne. He made many landscapes in the Post-Impressionist style, wrote a number of essays and commentaries on art, and become head of the Western Painting Department at the Imperial Art Academy in Tokyo. But like many painters of his generation, in his later years he began to work in the Nihonga mode. Using the traditional Japanese media of ink and paper, and sometimes color, Morita made landscapes of surprising lyricism that led a critic to call him the “poet of the plains.” This hanging scroll of a traveler leading his horse through tall grass, past a stand of pines and Mt. Fuji, is a fine example of this period. Today, Morita Tsunetomo’s works reside in many museum collections, including The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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Ogawa Sen'yo 小川千甕 (1881-1971), Five-Colored Reishi Mushrooms, circa 1965-1971. Ink and pigment on paper, 137 x 60 cm., hanging scroll, resin jikusaki, signed box. The kanji inscription reads: "Mountains and rivers, clouds and rain, five rows (wood, fire, earth, gold, water), yin and yang (positive and negative), day and night, these spirits produce the five colors of reishi. These are the signs of the holy king."

Though he didn't belong to any painting movement or school, Ogawa Sen'yo created one of the most original bodies of work of any modern Japanese painter. His parents ran a Buddhist bookstore in Kyoto, and from early childhood Sen'yo was steeped in the culture of Zen. He apprenticed with a Buddhist painter at age 15, and in 1904 began to study Western painting with Asai Chu (1856-1907), who himself had studied with Antonio Fontanesi. Sen'yo produced Japanese and Western paintings, published cartoons, and for a time took a job painting porcelain. 

Beginning 1912, under the patronage of a Kyoto wool merchant, Sen'yo spent two years in Europe; while traveling in France, he met Auguste Renoir at his studio in Cagnes. Upon returning to Japan, he began writing poetry, some of which appeared in the well-known tanka magazine Araragi. The first work of his to be accepted at the national Inten exhibition, in 1921, was an oil painting, but afterward Sen'yo devoted himself mainly to Nihonga. He traveled widely around Japan, and later made painting tours of China, Korea and Taiwan. 

This painting, of a girl carrying a basket of reishi mushrooms, dates from the last decade of his life, when Sen'yo was bedridden. He referred to his predicament—days mostly spent lying on his back—as gyoga zen, or lying-down meditation. Nonetheless he managed to devote two hours every morning to painting and calligraphy. His work from this period is marked by bright colors, a free approach to calligraphy, and a feeling of unrestrained joy that embodies the Zen spirit.

Sen'yo's paintings reside in many public collections in Japan, including those of the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto. In 2015, The Museum of Kyoto mounted a retrospective that travelled to Fukushima and Tokyo, and resulted in the first monograph spanning Sen'yo's entire career. 

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Sakai Sanryo 酒井三良 (1897-1969), Bamboo Cutter in Fall, circa mid-1940s. Ink and pigment on paper, 52 x 44.5 cm., hanging scroll, resin jikusaki, signed box, lacquered outer box.

Since his death, Sanryo's lyrical rural landscapes have proven increasingly popular and influential. He studied painting under Sakauchi Seiran (1881-1936) and received a prize at an exhibition held by the The Society for the Creation of a National Style of Painting. Encouraged by the Ogawa Usen (1868-1938), he exhibited at the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibitions and joined the influential Sango-kai (Coral Society), where he showed his paintings alongside those of Kondo Koichiro (1884-1962), Morita Tsunetomo (1881-1933) and Usen, older artists whose lyrical, nonconformist sensibilities influenced Sanryo's mature work. In 1924, he became a member of the the Japan Academy of Fine Arts; he received the Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts in 1962.

Sanryo's paintings are in the permanent collections of many Japanese museums, including the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto.

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Wada Sanzo 和田三造 (1883-1967), Squirrels in a Chestnut Tree, 1947. Ink and pigment on paper, hanging scroll, pottery jikusaki, signed box. Inscription reads: "Painted in Showa 22. Sanzo saku." 

The eclectic and industrious Sanzo is known best as an oil painter, but his Japanese-style paintings and prints have, arguably, aged better than his canvases. A native of Hyogo Prefecture, he studied oil painting with Kuroda Seiki (1866-1924) and graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1904. Monumental canvases like "South Wind," from 1907, made Sanzo one of the most prominent oil painters of his day, winning him dozens of awards at national exhibitions. After spending seven years in Europe and studying the textile arts of India, Burma and Java, he returned to Japan in 1914 and by the end of the decade began painting in the Japanese style. He became a member of the Imperial Art Academy, a juror at the government-sponsored Bunten and Teiten exhibitions, and a professor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts.

Sanzo is also remembered for his pioneering contributions to color theory—his multi-volume Dictionary of Color Combinations was republished in 2010 and remains influential. After the war he devoted himself to prints and Nihonga, like this charming, freely painted hanging scroll of squirrels in a chestnut tree. In 1954, his costume design for the film Gate of Hell, the first Japanese color film to be released outside the country, won an Academy Award. Sanzo was named a Person of Cultural Merit, one of Japan's highest arts honors, in 1958.

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Shinsen-en by Tamamura Hokuto 玉村方久斗 (1893–1951), circa mid-20s. Ink and pigment on silk, set of two hanging scrolls, each 139 x 45 cm. Signed Hokuto.

A singular figure in the Japanese avant-garde, Tamamura Hokuto was born in the central ward of Kyoto to a family that owned a shop that sold geta, the traditional wooden sandal. He attended the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and the Kyoto Municipal Fine Arts College, where he studied with Kikuchi Hobun (1862-1918). In 1915, with classmates Okamoto Shinso (1894-1933), Kainosho Tadaoto (1894-1978), and Irie Hako (1887-1948), he founded a forward-looking Nihonga group called Mitsuritsu-kai.

After showing his work in several of the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibitions and moving to Tokyo, in 1918 Hokuto won the Inten's Chogyu Prize for a set of startlingly modern picture scrolls based on Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu Monogotari). He recreated them again in 1923, after the originals were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake. During this period he made many paintings based on traditional Japanese texts such as Tale of Genji and Tales of Ise. 

As the Taisho period came to an end, Hokuto lost interest in conventional Nihonga, devoting himself to avant-garde movements such as Daiichi Sakka Domei (D.S.D.), Sanka, and Tan’i Sanka (Unit Sanka). He exhibited three-dimensional works (now lost) said to resemble those of Vladimir Tatlin; inspired by the Constructivists, he sometimes signed his works with a Russified version of his birth name, Zennosuke, styling himself Zenofskey. With the help of his patron, Yoshida Nobukata of the Isshiki Kappan Printing Company, he founded the experimental art journals Epoch and GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM (G.G.P.G.). In 1930, he founded an art association named after himself—Hokuto-sha. A prolific printmaker and painter, Hokuto eventually turned his attention to contemporary everyday scenes, rendered in a grotesque and humorous style. 

Recent interest in Hokuto's work culminated in Tamamura Hokuto: Revolutionary of Japanese-Style Painting, a retrospective held in 2008 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, as well as a career-spanning monograph. 

This mid-1920s landscape depicting the Shinsen-en garden in Kyoto is a rare example of a single composition spread across two hanging scrolls.

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Tomita Keisen 富田渓仙 (1879-1936), Yodo Castle, circa 1930s. Ink and pigment on prepared silk, 27 x 24 cm., hanging scroll, ivory jikusaki, signed box, lacquered outer box.

"Keisen is a remarkable artist, the likes of which only comes along every several hundred years," said the celebrated Nihonga painter Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), who invited Keisen to join the reformed Japan Art Institute in 1914. It was a good thing, too; in the Kyoto art world, the eccentric, hard-drinking Keisen had been regarded as something of a novelty.

The son of an affluent noodle merchant from Hakata (now Fukuoka City), Keisen began his training at age 12 with artists working in the Kano and literati styles. Dissatisfied with these approaches, he traveled to Kyoto at age 17 to apprentice with the innovative Shijo artist Tsuji Kako (1870-1931). By 1905, Keisen abandoned Kako's realism and precise brushwork for the looser, more exuberant style he would come to be known for. Eventually he turned his attention to literati painting, replacing the traditional, patternized conventions of the genre with elements he sketched from life. Over the course of his career he embarked on a study of Heian-period Buddhist paintings, immersed himself in the works of the Zen painter Sengai, traveled to China and Taiwan, and collaborated with the poet Paul Claudel, who was serving as France’s ambassador to Japan. Keisen died of a cerebral hemorrhage, abetted by heavy drinking, at the height of his popularity. 

Keisen combined aspects of various Japanese painting styles—literati, yamato-e, shijo, zen, rinpa—with Western expressionism to achieve his poetic effects and still-apparent originality. A career retrospective of his work was held at the Kyoto Municipal Art Museum in 1996. The Fukuoka Museum of Art mounted another retrospective, commemorating the 130th anniversary of Keisen's birth, in 2009.

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Kojima Ikkei 小島一谿 (1899-1974), Early Autumn Comes to the Lake. Pigment on silk, hanging scroll, antler jikusaki, signed box. Signed Ikkei.

A masterly draftsman, Ikkei adapted the techniques of handling oil paint to Japanese-style landscape painting. He was born in Gifu City but spent most of his life in Yokohama. After studying oil painting at the Kawasaki Painting Research Center, he switched to Nihonga and, in 1916, became a student of the eminent painter Maeda Seison (1885-1977). With Nakashima Kiyoshi and others, he helped set up the Tsutobikai art association. A frequent participant in the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibition, Ikkei won the Japan Art Institute Award and the Encouragement Award, eventually becoming a full-fledged member of the organization.

This atmospheric landscape shows off Ikkei's thick layering of mineral pigment in the manner of oil paint, particularly in his depiction of the near trees, a technique first used during the Taisho period to expand the expressive possibilities of Nihonga. 

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Kikuchi Kashu 菊池華秋 (1888-1946), Mountain Kiln in Mino, circa 1930s. Pigment on silk, hanging scroll, ivory jikusaki, signed box, cedar outer box. Signed Kashu.

Known during his life as a master of bijinga (paintings of beautiful women), Kashu also left behind a series of colorful, unusual landscapes like this one.

A native of Yamagata Prefecture, Kashu began an apprenticeship with the celebrated Nihonga painter Kawai Gyokudo (1873-1957) in 1909. He became lifelong friends with the bijinga painter Ikeda Terukata (1883-1921), another student of Gyokudo. Kashu showed frequently and successfully at the government-organized Bunten and Inten exhibitions. His work is housed in the permanent collections of a number of Japanese museums, including that of the Mizuno Museum of Art, Nagano.

This large painting of an anagama kiln in Mino combines Gyokudo's Shijo-school technique with modernist touches: the thickly layered pigment in the autumn foliage as well as the bold use of negative space in the areas of untreated silk. 

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Kawasaki Shoko 川崎小虎 (1886 - 1977), Rock Garden. Ink on paper, 43 x 30 cm., hanging scroll, pottery jikusaki, signed box, cedar outer box. Signed Shoko.

Kawasaki Shoko brought a lyrical expressionism to traditional Japanese subject matter. He was trained first by his grandfather, the Yamato-e painter Kawasaki Chitora (1835-1902), and later by Kobori Tomoto (1864-1931). In 1944, he was evacuated to Ochiai Village in Yamanashi Prefecture, where he began painting the animals, plants and landscapes of the area in an increasingly pared-down style seen in this painting of a rock garden. He won a number of awards at the Bunten and other national juried exhibitions, and in 1961 received the Imperial Award from the Japan Art Academy.

Shoko became an influential painting professor at the Tokyo Univeristy of Fine Arts and Musashino Art University. His eldest daughter, Sumi, married the celebrated Nihonga painter Higashiyama Kaii. Shoko's work is housed in the permanent collections of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Gifu Prefectural Museum, and many other institutions. In 2007, the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum exhibited a dual retrospective of Shoko and Higashiyama Kaii.

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Ogawa Sen'yo 小川千甕 (1881-1971), Spring Landscape, Showa period. Ink and pigment on paper, 121 x 41 cm., hanging scroll, antler jikusaki.

Though he didn't belong to any painting movement or school, Ogawa Sen'yo created one of the most original bodies of work of any modern Japanese painter. His parents ran a Buddhist bookstore in Kyoto, and from early childhood Sen'yo was steeped in the culture of Zen. He apprenticed with a Buddhist painter at age 15, and in 1904 began to study Western painting with Asai Chu (1856-1907), who himself had studied with Antonio Fontanesi. Sen'yo produced Japanese and Western paintings, published cartoons, and soon took a job painting porcelain. 

Beginning 1912, under the patronage of a Kyoto wool merchant, Sen'yo spent two years in Europe; while traveling in France, he met Auguste Renoir at his studio in Cagnes. Upon returning to Japan, he began writing poetry, some of which appeared in the well-known tanka magazine Araragi. The first work of his to be accepted at the national Inten exhibition, in 1921, was an oil painting, but afterward Sen'yo devoted himself mainly to Nihonga. He traveled widely around Japan, and later made painting tours of China, Korea and Taiwan. After an illness in 1958, Sen'yo became mostly bedridden, a predicament he referred to as as gyoga zen, or lying-down meditation. Nonetheless he managed to devote two hours every morning to painting and calligraphy, and produced arguably his finest, most indelible work during this period. 

Sen'yo's paintings reside in many public collections in Japan, including those of the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto. In 2015, The Museum of Kyoto mounted a retrospective that travelled to Fukushima and Tokyo, and resulted in the first monograph spanning Sen'yo's entire career. 

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Tomita Keisen 富田渓仙 (1879-1936), Tateyama Landscape. Ink and blue and yellow pigment on prepared silk, 36 x 24.5 cm., an album leaf mounted as a hanging scroll, resin jikusaki, signed box, lacquered outer box.

"Keisen is a remarkable artist, the likes of which only comes along every several hundred years," said the celebrated Nihonga painter Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), who invited Keisen to join the reformed Japan Art Institute in 1914. It was a good thing, too; in the Kyoto art world, the eccentric, hard-drinking Keisen had been regarded as something of a novelty.

The son of an affluent noodle merchant from Hakata (now Fukuoka City), Keisen began his training at age 12 with artists working in the Kano and literati styles. Dissatisfied with these approaches, he traveled to Kyoto at age 17 to apprentice with the innovative Shijo artist Tsuji Kako (1870-1931). By 1905, Keisen abandoned Kako's realism and precise brushwork for the looser, more exuberant style he would come to be known for. He embarked on a study of Heian-period Buddhist paintings, immersed himself in the works of the Zen painter Sengai, and travelled to Taiwan and China. Eventually he turned his attention to literati painting, replacing the traditional, patternized conventions of the genre with elements he sketched from life. Keisen died of a cerebral hemorrhage, abetted by heavy drinking, at the height of his popularity. 

Keisen combined aspects of various Japanese painting styles—literati, yamato-e, shijo, zen, rinpa—with Western expressionism to achieve his poetic effects and still-apparent originality. Today he is widely regarded as one's of Nihonga's most influential practitioners. A career retrospective of his work was held at the Kyoto Municipal Art Museum in 1996. The Fukuoka Museum of Art mounted another retrospective, commemorating the 130th anniversary of Keisen's birth, in 2009.

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Peeping Tom by Tamamura Hokuto 玉村方久斗 (1893–1951), circa mid-20s. Ink and pigment on gilt silk, 142 x 46 cm., framed. Signed Hokuto.

A singular figure in the Japanese avant-garde, Tamamura Hokuto was born in the central ward of Kyoto to a family that owned a shop that sold geta, the traditional wooden sandal. He attended the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and the Kyoto Municipal Fine Arts College, where he studied with Kikuchi Hobun (1862-1918). In 1915, with classmates Okamoto Shinso (1894-1933), Kainosho Tadaoto (1894-1978), and Irie Hako (1887-1948), he founded a forward-looking Nihonga group called Mitsuritsu-kai.

After showing his work in several of the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibitions and moving to Tokyo, in 1918 Hokuto won the Inten's Chogyu Prize for a set of startlingly modern picture scrolls based on Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu Monogotari). He recreated them again in 1923, after the originals were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake. During this period he made many paintings based on traditional Japanese texts such as Tale of Genji and Tales of Ise. 

As the Taisho period came to an end, Hokuto lost interest in conventional Nihonga, devoting himself to avant-garde movements such as Daiichi Sakka Domei (D.S.D.), Sanka, and Tan’i Sanka (Unit Sanka). He exhibited three-dimensional works (now lost) said to resemble those of Vladimir Tatlin; inspired by the Constructivists, he sometimes signed his works with a Russified version of his birth name, Zennosuke, styling himself Zenofskey. With the help of his patron, Yoshida Nobukata of the Isshiki Kappan Printing Company, he founded the experimental art journals Epoch and GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM (G.G.P.G.). In 1930, he founded an art association named after himself—Hokuto-sha. A prolific printmaker and painter, Hokuto eventually turned his attention to contemporary everyday scenes, rendered in a grotesque and humorous style. 

Recent interest in Hokuto's work culminated in Tamamura Hokuto: Revolutionary of Japanese-Style Painting, a retrospective held in 2008 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, as well as a career-spanning monograph. 

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Chinese Landscape by Kai Kozan 甲斐虎山 (1867-1961), Showa Period. Ink and pigment on paper, 100 x 26.5 cm., hanging scroll, signed box, antler jikusaki.

A native of Usuki in Oita Prefecture, Kozan exemplified the artworld maverick. He apprenticed with the eminent literati painter Hoashi Kyou (1810-1884). After moving to Kyoto, he married the poet Kai Wariko (1868-1962); together they founded a pioneering girls’ school that became Kyoto Women’s University, where Wariko taught for the remainder of her career.

Kozan studied Chinese and traveled to China and Korea, activities that informed his distinctive landscape painting. Though he became active in the Nanga Institute, his work remained remarkably true to the nonconformist legacy of Edo-period literati painters like Ike no Taiga and Yosa Buson—fused with poetry (often his wife’s), boldly individualistic, and proudly amateur in spirit. His paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Oita Prefectural Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the University of California Art Museum.

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Shimizu Hian 清水比庵 (1883-1975), Red Fudo Myoo. Ink and pigment on paper, 57 x 44 cm., framed. The inscription reads: "Getting rid of the bad and promoting the good in this world. Please protect us. Namu Dayouji Fudo." Signed Hian.

In 1969, when the poet, calligrapher and painter Shimizu Hian was 86 years old, a newspaper in Japan dubbed him "the Ryokan of his time," referring to the beloved poet-monk of the Edo period. This rather sentimental comparison overlooks how successful Hian was at incorporating the modernist influences of his era into his quintessentially Japanese art. 

A native of Okayama Prefecture, Hian graduated from Kyoto Imperial University and held a series of jobs in banking and law while pursuing poetry and painting. He studied for a time with the oil painter Matsubara Sangoro (1864-1946) and published his first poetry collection in 1929. The following year, Hian became the mayor of Nikko, a post he held for the next nine years. Though he was close to a number of eminent Nihonga painters, among them Kosugi Hoan (1881-1964) and Kawai Gyokudo (1873-1957), and showed his work widely, Hian chose not to participate in national juried exhibitions. His paintings and calligraphy have been the subject of numerous books and museum exhibitions, most recently "Shimizu Hian and the Artists of the Modern Era," at the Fukuyama Museum of Calligraphy, in 2013.

The wrathful but righteous Buddhist deity Fudo Myoo (Acala in Sanskrit) is a subject Hian returned to often. A domestic protector, Fudosan is also said to protect the living from disaster. 

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Shimizu Hian 清水比庵 (1883-1975), Blue Fudo Myoo. Ink and pigment on paper, 50.5 x 30 cm., framed. The inscription reads: "Getting rid of the bad and promoting the good in this world. Please protect us. Namu Dayouji Fudo." Signed Hian.

In 1969, when the poet, calligrapher and painter Shimizu Hian was 86 years old, a newspaper dubbed him "the Ryokan of his time," referring to the beloved poet-monk of the Edo period.  This rather sentimental comparison overlooks how successful Hian was at incorporating the modernist influences of his era into his quintessentially Japanese art. 

In 1969, when the poet, calligrapher and painter Shimizu Hian was 86 years old, a newspaper in Japan dubbed him "the Ryokan of his time," referring to the beloved poet-monk of the Edo period. This rather sentimental comparison overlooks how successful Hian was at incorporating the modernist influences of his era into his quintessentially Japanese art. 

A native of Okayama Prefecture, Hian graduated from Kyoto Imperial University and held a series of jobs in banking and law while pursuing poetry and painting. He studied for a time with the oil painter Matsubara Sangoro (1864-1946) and published his first poetry collection in 1929. The following year, Hian became the mayor of Nikko, a post he held for the next nine years. Though he was close to a number of eminent Nihonga painters, among them Kosugi Hoan (1881-1964) and Kawai Gyokudo (1873-1957), and showed his work widely, Hian chose not to participate in national juried exhibitions. His paintings and calligraphy have been the subject of numerous books and museum exhibitions, most recently "Shimizu Hian and the Artists of the Modern Era," at the Fukuyama Museum of Calligraphy, in 2013.

The wrathful but righteous Buddhist deity Fudo Myoo (Acala in Sanskrit) is a subject Hian returned to often. A domestic protector, Fudosan is also said to protect the living from disaster.  

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Landscape by Fujii Tatsukichi 藤井達吉 (1881-1964). Ink and gold leaf on paper, hanging scroll, pottery jikusaki, signed box.

Few artists of any period could have boasted as varied and prolific a body of work as the self-taught Fujii Tatsukichi, a central figure in Japan's modern crafts movement. A native of Aichi Prefecture, Tatsukichi traveled to the US in 1905 as an employee of a Nagoya cloisonne dealer who took part in the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon. While in Boston, Tatsukichi was inspired by the art he saw at the Museum of Fine Arts, and upon returning to Japan he quit his job and moved to Tokyo. There, he began creating not only cloisonne but textiles, ceramics, lacquerware, paper crafts, engraving and painting. Tatsukichi was a leading force in having crafts shown at government-organized exhibitions and recognized as a vital branch of the modern arts. He became a frequent exhibition juror and a professor at the Imperial Art School in Tokyo (later known as Musashino Art University). 

In his later years, Tatsukichi returned to Aichi prefecture and devoted himself to paper crafts and literati painting. The subject of a number of monographs, his work can be found in nearly every major public collection of modern art in Japan. In 1996, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art exhibited a retrospective titled, "Fujii Tatsukichi: Modern Crafts Pioneer." The Fujii Tatsukichi Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Hekinan in 2008.

This hanging scroll, which dates from the last decade of Tatsukichi's life, combines an austere monochrome depiction of mountains and pines with applications of gold leaf. Tatsukichi's mixture of seemingly incompatible elements of nanga and rinpa create an arrestingly modernist juxtaposition. 

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A scene from Tale of Genji by Tamamura Hokuto 玉村方久斗 (1893–1951), circa mid-20s. Ink and pigment on gilt silk, 140 x 45 cm., framed. Signed Hokuto.

A singular figure in the Japanese avant-garde, Tamamura Hokuto was born in the central ward of Kyoto to a family that owned a shop that sold geta, the traditional wooden sandal. He attended the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and the Kyoto Municipal Fine Arts College, where he studied with Kikuchi Hobun (1862-1918). In 1915, with classmates Okamoto Shinso (1894-1933), Kainosho Tadaoto (1894-1978), and Irie Hako (1887-1948), he founded a forward-looking Nihonga group called Mitsuritsu-kai.

After showing his work in several of the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibitions and moving to Tokyo, in 1918 Hokuto won the Inten's Chogyu Prize for a set of startlingly modern picture scrolls based on Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu Monogotari). He recreated them again in 1923, after the originals were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake. During this period he made many paintings based on traditional Japanese texts such as Tale of Genji and Tales of Ise. 

As the Taisho period came to an end, Hokuto lost interest in conventional Nihonga, devoting himself to avant-garde movements such as Daiichi Sakka Domei (D.S.D.), Sanka, and Tan’i Sanka (Unit Sanka). He exhibited three-dimensional works (now lost) said to resemble those of Vladimir Tatlin; inspired by the Constructivists, he sometimes signed his works with a Russified version of his birth name, Zennosuke, styling himself Zenofskey. With the help of his patron, Yoshida Nobukata of the Isshiki Kappan Printing Company, he founded the experimental art journals Epoch and GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM (G.G.P.G.). In 1930, he founded an art association named after himself—Hokuto-sha. A prolific printmaker and painter, Hokuto eventually turned his attention to contemporary everyday scenes, rendered in a grotesque and humorous style. 

Recent interest in Hokuto's work culminated in Tamamura Hokuto: Revolutionary of Japanese-Style Painting, a retrospective held in 2008 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, as well as a career-spanning monograph. 

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Tanaka Anzanshi 田中案山子 (1906-1970), Playing Go in Moonlight. Ink and pigment on silk, 50.5 x 44.5 cm., hanging scroll, ivory jikusaki, signed box. Signed Anzanshi.

The idiosyncratic Anzanshi fused the aesthetics of literati painting and manga in his decidedly unconventional work. He was born near Tokyo and studied with the enigmatic stylist Tanaka Ichian (1896-1958) before having his paintings accepted at the juried Inten and Teiten exhibitions. Anzanshi found great success at these events but remained dissatisfied with what he saw as their conformist influence, and so he became a founding member of several alternative artists' groups, like the Shinko Bijutsu-In, which he founded in 1937 with Kobayashi Sokyojin (1897-1978) and others. He continued to show widely after the war, mounting 18 solo shows at Mitsukoshi in Tokyo. 

This country scene is notable for its playful exaggeration (like the enormous stalks of corn) and masterful handling of ink. Its humor, warmth, and loose brushwork align it with the nostalgic rural scenes of Morita Tsunetomo (1881-1933) and Sakai Sanryo (1897-1969).

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Hirai Baisen 平井楳仙 (1889-1969), Summer Landscape, Taisho period. Ink and pigment on silk, hanging scroll, antler jikusaki, box. Signed Baisen.

The independent-minded Baisen made a huge impact on the Kyoto art world at an early age. He graduated from the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1906; instead of apprenticing at the private academy of an established painter after graduation, he set out on his own. From 1907 (when he was 18) until 1931, his work appeared at the government-sponsored Bunten and Teiten exhibitions every year but one, winning numerous prizes. In 1914 he traveled to China, and afterward the landscapes he saw there began to make their way into his paintings.

In the late 1920s, critical hostility to his work began to diminish his reputation, and after the war Baisen stopped submitting his work to exhibitions, busying himself with painting small, colorful hanging scrolls. A recent reexamination of the art of the Taisho period helped rehabilitate his reputation; today, his paintings can be found in numerous permanent collections, including those of the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and in Kyoto.

This Taisho-period landscape captures the innovative wet brushwork and unusual sense of color that characterized Baisen’s early career.

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Shingo Hoshino 星野眞吾 (1923-1997), Winter Mountains, Showa period. Ink on paper, 152 x 75 cm., hanging scroll, pottery jikusaki, signed box.

Shingo Hoshino is an artist who embodies the stylistic ferment of post-war Japanese painting. After graduating from the painting department of the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1948, he founded an art association for oil painters devoted to realism. Yet his own work would vacillate between realism and abstraction, between Western and Japanese modes. Like his friend Nakamura Masayoshi (1924-1977), Hoshino continued to expand his formal vocabulary and push against the boundaries of Japanese painting. In 1991, the government of France proclaimed him a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The Shingo Hoshino Prize was established posthumously to recognize promising young artists. The subject of several retrospectives, Hoshino's work is in the permanent collections of numerous Japanese museums, including The National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and in Kyoto.

This unusual painting, mounted on a hanging scroll and stored in a paulownia box signed by the artist, demonstrates Hoshino applying his modernist technique to a traditional Japanese form.

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Ogawa Sen'yo 小川千甕 (1881-1971), Reed Cutters, Showa period. Ink and pigment on paper, 144 x 32 cm., hanging scroll, antler jikusaki, signed box.

Though he didn't belong to any painting movement or school, Ogawa Sen'yo created one of the most original bodies of work of any modern Japanese painter. His parents ran a Buddhist bookstore in Kyoto, and from early childhood Sen'yo was steeped in the culture of Zen. He apprenticed with a Buddhist painter at age 15, and in 1904 began to study Western painting with Asai Chu (1856-1907), who himself had studied with Antonio Fontanesi. Sen'yo produced Japanese and Western paintings, published cartoons, and soon took a job painting porcelain. 

Beginning 1912, under the patronage of a Kyoto wool merchant, Sen'yo spent two years in Europe; while traveling in France, he met Auguste Renoir at his studio in Cagnes. Upon returning to Japan, he began writing poetry, some of which appeared in the well-known tanka magazine Araragi. The first work of his to be accepted at the national Inten exhibition, in 1921, was an oil painting, but afterward Sen'yo devoted himself mainly to Nihonga. He traveled widely around Japan, and later made painting tours of China, Korea and Taiwan. After an illness in 1958, Sen'yo became mostly bedridden, a predicament he referred to as as gyoga zen, or lying-down meditation. Nonetheless he managed to devote two hours every morning to painting and calligraphy, and produced arguably his finest, most indelible work during this period. 

Sen'yo's paintings reside in many public collections in Japan, including those of the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto. In 2015, The Museum of Kyoto mounted a retrospective that travelled to Fukushima and Tokyo, and resulted in the first monograph spanning Sen'yo's entire career. 

Kosugi Hoan小杉放庵 (1881-1964), Spring Landscape. Ink and pigment on paper, 41 x 25.5 cm., hanging scroll, antler jikusaki, signed box.

Mori Getsujo 森月城 (1887-1961), Autumn in Shiobara, Showa period. Ink and pigment on silk, hanging scroll, ivory jikusaki, signed box. Signed Getsujo.

An inner disciple (uchi deshi) of the celebrated Kyoto painter Takeuchi Seiho (1864-1942), Getsujo found remarkable popularity before the war, appearing at the government-sponsored Bunten and Teiten exhibitions 24 times between 1909 to 1942. Though some considered him so close in style to his famous teacher that he was sometimes called "Seiho of Suma," Getsujo was in fact a more diverse and innovative artist than this nickname suggests.

This autumn landscape is from Getsujo's mature period, beginning in the late 1930s, and shows off his subtle treatement of color. The bold impasto effect in the yellow foliage points to Getsujo's interest in the formal innovations of the time.

Kondo Koichiro 近藤浩一路 (1884-1962), Shirakawa Women, Showa Period. Ink and pigment on gilt paper, 34 x 22 cm., framed. 

Kondo Koichiro practiced both Western-style painting and traditional Japanese-style painting, but he was best-known for his popular manga (cartoons), which appeared in books and newspapers throughout his career. 

He was born in the village of Mutsuai (the present-day town on Nanbu) in Yamanashi Prefecture; his birth name was Kondo Hiroshi. He studied Western painting at Tokyo Art School (the present Tokyo University of the Arts) with Kuroda Seiki (1866-1924), a leader of the Western-style painting movement in Japan, and Wada Eisaku (1874-1959,) another well-known Western-style painter.  After his graduation in 1910, Kondo practiced Western-style painting and drew manga and illustrations for the Yomiuri Shinbun and Asahi Shinbun newspapers.

Around 1915, he joined the Sango-kai (Coral Society), an organization of Japanese-style painters, which counted Ikeda Eiji (1889-1950), Ogawa Usen (1868-1938), Ogawa Senyō (1882-1971), Kawabata Ryushi (1885-1966), Tsuruta Goro (1890-1969), Natori Shunsen (1886-1960), Yamamura Toyonari (1885-1942), Morita Tsunetomo (1881-1933) and Ishizuka Kan (active c. 1915) as members.  In 1919 he started entering his distinctive Japanese-style landscape paintings in the exhibitions of the Japan Art Institute, which he later joined. He exhibited regularly in the institute’s Inten exhibitions until his resignation from the group in 1936, after which he shunned membership in any artistic group.  

Kondo traveled extensively throughout Japan, including a 1917 trip to Hokkaido to sketch the Ainu people. He also traveled to China and, inspired by his teachers, traveled to Europe in 1922 and to Paris in 1931. It was during the 1931 trip that he captured the attention of the French novelist André Malraux, who based the character Kama, a Japanese-style ink painter, in his 1933 novel Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine), on Kondo. His trips to Europe are credited with his abandoning of Western-style painting in favor of traditional Japanese-style ink painting integrated with Western pictorial techniques.

Manga was a major part of Kondo's artistic output and income, and he went on to found the Nippon Manga-kai (Japanese Manga Society) with Naraharu Ikeda (1889-1950) and Okamoto Ippei (1886-1948), one of the forefathers of modern manga. He and Okamoto became well-known for their "manga scribblings," and with Okamoto he produced manga versions of Natsume Soseki's novels Botchan and I am a Cat.

In 2006 the Nerima Art Museum in Tokyo celebrated the 120th anniversary of Kondo Koichiro's birth with a comprehensive exhibition, All About Koichiro Kondo, which 120 works spanning the artist’s oil paintings, watercolors and cartoons.

The artist's works are in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art and many others. 

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Tomita Keisen 富田渓仙 (1879-1936), Tokaido, circa 1920s. Ink on paper, 58 x 32 cm., hanging scroll, bamboo jikusaki, signed box.

"Keisen is a remarkable artist, the likes of which only comes along every several hundred years," said the celebrated Nihonga painter Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), who invited Keisen to join the reformed Japan Art Institute in 1914. It was a good thing, too; in the Kyoto art world, the eccentric, hard-drinking Keisen had been regarded as something of a novelty.

The son of an affluent noodle merchant from Hakata (now Fukuoka City), Keisen began his training at age 12 with artists working in the Kano and literati styles. Dissatisfied with these approaches, he traveled to Kyoto at age 17 to apprentice with the innovative Shijo artist Tsuji Kako (1870-1931). By 1905, Keisen abandoned Kako's realism and precise brushwork for the looser, more exuberant style he would come to be known for. Eventually he turned his attention to literati painting, replacing the traditional, patternized conventions of the genre with elements he sketched from life. Over the course of his career he embarked on a study of Heian-period Buddhist paintings, immersed himself in the works of the Zen painter Sengai, traveled to China and Taiwan, and collaborated with the poet Paul Claudel, who was serving as France’s ambassador to Japan. Keisen died of a cerebral hemorrhage, abetted by heavy drinking, at the height of his popularity. 

Keisen combined aspects of various Japanese painting styles—literati, yamato-e, shijo, zen, rinpa—with Western expressionism to achieve his poetic effects and still-apparent originality. A career retrospective of his work was held at the Kyoto Municipal Art Museum in 1996, and was accompanied by a monograph. The Fukuoka Museum of Art mounted another retrospective, commemorating the 130th anniversary of Keisen's birth, in 2009.

Iwasaki Hajin 岩崎巴人 (1917-2010), Kappa in Moonlight. Pigment on silk, 93.5 x 45 cm., hanging scroll, ceramic jikusaki, box signed by the artist. Signed Hajin.

A Tokyo native, Hajin attended the Kawabata painting academy in Kyoto. Afterward, he continued to study Nihonga with Kobayashi Kokei (1883-1957) and oil painting with Satomi Katsuzo (1895-1981). An early work won a prize at the 1938 Inten, where it was praised by Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958). 

After the war Hajin moved to Ibaraki Prefecture, made a Buddhist pilgrimage to India (he painted a mural in Bodhgaya), and eventually was ordained as a Zen priest. His paintings, with their unique blend of Zen-influenced brushwork, bright colors, and Western abstraction, were exhibited widely in his lifetime. In his seventies, Hajin taught ink painting on NHK Educational TV and published a popular painting manual. His work resides in many public collections in Japan, including those of the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto, and the National Museum of Art in Osaka.

Kojima Ikkei 小島一谿 (1899-1974), Kashiwabara in the Snow. Pigment on silk, hanging scroll, antler jikusaki, signed box. Signed Ikkei.

A masterly draftsman, Ikkei adapted the techniques of handling oil paint to Japanese-style landscape painting. He was born in Gifu City but spent most of his life in Yokohama. After studying oil painting at the Kawasaki Painting Research Center, he switched to Nihonga and, in 1916, became a student of the eminent painter Maeda Seison (1885-1977). With Nakashima Kiyoshi and others, he helped set up the Tsutobikai art association. A frequent participant in the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibition, Ikkei won the Japan Art Institute Award and the Encouragement Award, eventually becoming a full-fledged member of the organization.

This landscape of the tiny village of Kashiwabara, the birthplace of the poet Issa located in the mountains of the Shinano province, is remarkable for its complexity. The jutting verticals and low horizon line wedded to the traditional subject matter create a sense of stylistic dislocation, a tension between Western and Japanese elements that characterizes Ikkei's best work.

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Tomita Keisen 富田渓仙 (1879-1936), Bodhisattva. Ink on paper, 112 x 36.5 cm., hanging scroll, wood jikusaki, signed box, lacquered outer box, circa 1925.

"Keisen is a remarkable artist, the likes of which only comes along every several hundred years," said the celebrated Nihonga painter Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), who invited Keisen to join the reformed Japan Art Institute in 1914. It was a good thing, too; in the Kyoto art world, the eccentric, hard-drinking Keisen had been regarded as something of a novelty.

The son of an affluent noodle merchant from Hakata (now Fukuoka City), Keisen began his training at age 12 with artists working in the Kano and literati styles. Dissatisfied with these approaches, he traveled to Kyoto at age 17 to apprentice with the innovative Shijo artist Tsuji Kako (1870-1931). By 1905, Keisen abandoned Kako's realism and precise brushwork for the looser, more exuberant style he would come to be known for. He embarked on a study of Heian-period Buddhist paintings, immersed himself in the works of the Zen painter Sengai, and travelled to Taiwan and China. Eventually he turned his attention to literati painting, replacing the traditional, patternized conventions of the genre with elements he sketched from life. Keisen died of a cerebral hemorrhage, abetted by heavy drinking, at the height of his popularity. 

Keisen combined aspects of various Japanese painting styles—literati, yamato-e, shijo, zen, rinpa—with Western expressionism to achieve his poetic effects and still-apparent originality. Today he is widely regarded as one's of Nihonga's most influential practitioners. A career retrospective of his work was held at the Kyoto Municipal Art Museum in 1996, and was accompanied by a monograph. The Fukuoka Museum of Art mounted another retrospective, commemorating the 130th anniversary of Keisen's birth, in 2009.

This hanging scroll of a Bodhisattva is nearly identical to a section of Spiritual Reincarnations, a set of two screens from 1925.

Hirai Baisen 平井楳仙 (1889-1969), Chinese Landscape, Showa period. Ink and pigment on silk, hanging scroll, antler jikusaki, box. Signed Baisen.

The independent-minded Baisen made a huge impact on the Kyoto art world at an early age. He graduated from the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1906; instead of apprenticing at an atelier of an established painter after graduation, he set out on his own. From 1907 (when he was 18) until 1931, his work appeared at the government-sponsored Bunten and Teiten exhibition every year but one, winning numerous prizes. In 1914 he traveled to China, and afterward the landscapes he saw there began to make their way into his paintings. In the late 1920s, critical hostility to his work began to diminish his reputation, and after the war Baisen stopped submitting his work to exhibitions, busying himself with painting small, colorful hanging scrolls. A recent reexamination of the art of the Taisho peirod has partly rehabilitated his reputation; today, his paintings can be found in numerous permanent collections, including those of the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and in Kyoto.

Though many critics consider Baisen's paintings from the Showa period inferior to his earlier work, this scroll shows the subtlety, originality and draftsmanship he was capable of in middle age. The impressionistic rendering of the pagoda recalls the work of Turner as well as such Japanese masters as Konoshima Okoku (1877-1938).
 

Mori Getsujo 森月城 (1887-1961), Autumn Foliage at Arashimaya, 1918. Pigment on silk, hanging scroll, antler jikusaki, signed box. Signed Getsujo.

An inner disciple (uchi deshi) of the celebrated Kyoto painter Takeuchi Seiho (1864-1942), Getsujo found remarkable popularity before the war, appearing at the government-sponsored Bunten and Teiten exhibitions 24 times between 1909 to 1942. Though some considered him so close in style to his famous teacher that he was sometimes called "Seiho of Suma," Getsujo was in fact a more diverse and innovative artist than this nickname suggests.

The free brushwork in this landscape, particularly in the depiction of the pines at the bottom, owes more to avant-garde painters like Tomita Keisen (1879-1936) than to Seiho's meticulous draftsmanship.  

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Fox and Dragonfly by Tamamura Hokuto 玉村方久斗 (1893–1951), circa 1926-1932. Ink and pigment on silk, hanging scroll, 142 x 45 cm. Signed Hokuto.

A singular figure in the Japanese avant-garde, Tamamura Hokuto was born in the central ward of Kyoto to a family that owned a shop that sold geta, the traditional wooden sandal. He attended the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and the Kyoto Municipal Fine Arts College, where he studied with Kikuchi Hobun (1862-1918). In 1915, with classmates Okamoto Shinso (1894-1933), Kainosho Tadaoto (1894-1978), and Irie Hako (1887-1948), he founded a forward-looking Nihonga group called Mitsuritsu-kai.

After showing his work in several of the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibitions and moving to Tokyo, in 1918 Hokuto won the Inten's Chogyu Prize for a set of startlingly modern picture scrolls based on Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu Monogotari). He recreated them again in 1923, after the originals were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake. During this period he made many paintings based on traditional Japanese texts such as Tale of Genji and Tales of Ise. 

As the Taisho period came to an end, Hokuto lost interest in conventional Nihonga, devoting himself to avant-garde movements such as Daiichi Sakka Domei (D.S.D.), Sanka, and Tan’i Sanka (Unit Sanka). He exhibited three-dimensional works (now lost) said to resemble those of Vladimir Tatlin; inspired by the Constructivists, he sometimes signed his works with a Russified version of his birth name, Zennosuke, styling himself Zenofskey. With the help of his patron, Yoshida Nobukata of the Isshiki Kappan Printing Company, he founded the experimental art journals Epoch and GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM (G.G.P.G.). In 1930, he founded an art association named after himself—Hokuto-sha. A prolific printmaker and painter, Hokuto eventually turned his attention to contemporary everyday scenes, rendered in a grotesque and humorous style. 

Recent interest in Hokuto's work culminated in Tamamura Hokuto: Revolutionary of Japanese-Style Painting, a retrospective held in 2008 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, as well as a career-spanning monograph. 

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Iwasaki Hajin 岩崎巴人 (1917-2010), Red and White Plum Blossoms in Spring Light. Pigment on silk, 62.5 x 43.7 cm., hanging scroll, resin jikusaki, box signed by the artist. Signed Hajin.

A Tokyo native, Hajin attended the Kawabata painting academy in Kyoto. Afterward, he continued to study Nihonga with Kobayashi Kokei (1883-1957) and oil painting with Satomi Katsuzo (1895-1981). An early work won a prize at the 1938 Inten, where it was praised by Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958). 

After the war Hajin moved to Ibaraki Prefecture, made a Buddhist pilgrimage to India (he painted a mural in Bodhgaya), and eventually was ordained as a Zen priest. His paintings, with their unique blend of Zen-influenced brushwork, bright colors, and Western abstraction, were exhibited widely in his lifetime. In his seventies, Hajin taught ink painting on NHK Educational TV and published a popular painting manual. His work resides in many public collections in Japan, including those of the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto, and the National Museum of Art in Osaka.

Sawada Seiko  澤田政廣 (1894-1988), Fudo Myoo. Ink and pigment on paper, 64.8 x 57.8 cm., framed. Signed Seiko.

One of Japan's foremost sculptors of the last century, Sawada Seiko produced a wide range of art, including paintings, calligraphy, prints, ceramics and stained glass. He was born in Atami City, Shizuoka Prefecture, graduated from the sculpture department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and at age 19 began to study with Zuiun Yamamoto (1867-1941) and, later, with Koun Takamura (1852-1934). During his career, he received nearly every national arts honor: he won the Encouragement Award and the Japan Arts Institute Award, became a member the Japan Arts Academy and the Executive Director of the Nitten, and was awarded both the bunka korosha (A Person of Cultural Merit) and the bunka-kunsho (The Order of Culture). Shortly after his death, the Sawada Seiko Memorial Museum opened its doors in Atami City, near Mount Fuji.

This large painting of Fudo Myoo, the fearsome Wisdom King and household protector, is one of the artist's diverse paintings of Buddhist dieties. 

Hasegawa Chofu 長谷川朝風 (1901-1977), Gojo Bridge. Ink and pigment on paper, 68 x 29 cm., framed. 

The eccentric painter and poet Hasegawa Chofu graduated from the painting department of the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts and studied haiku with Iida Dakotsu (1885-1962) and painting with Kondo Koichiro (1884-1962). Many of his eclectic paintings mined humor and unusual subject matter to achieve their effect. Despite suffering from degenerative eye disease, Chofu managed to win many awards at national arts exhibitions, including an Inten scholarship. A large number of his works can be found in the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, and in the collections of other Japanese museums.  

This whimsical, exuberantly brushed painting depicts the warrior-monk Musashibo Benkei (1155-1199), a veritable giant who was said to have defeated 999 warriors on Gojo Bridge in Kyoto. During his 1000th duel, he was finally beaten by MInamoto no Yoshitsune (1159-1189), a legendary general whom Benkei would go on to serve. In some accounts of his duel with Benkei, Yoshitsune is said to have been disguised as a woman.

Sakai Sanryo 酒井三良 (1897-1969), Stormy Sky. Ink and pigment on paper, 27 x 24 cm., framed, circa early 1940s. Signed Sanryoshi.

Since his death, Sanryo's lyrical rural landscapes have proven increasingly popular and influential. He studied painting under Sakauchi Seiran (1881-1936) and received a prize at an exhibition held by the The Society for the Creation of a National Style of Painting. Encouraged by the Ogawa Usen (1868-1938), he exhibited at the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibitions and joined the influential Sango-kai (Coral Society), where he showed his paintings alongside those of Kondo Koichiro (1884-1962), Morita Tsunetomo (1881-1933) and Usen, older artists whose lyrical, nonconformist sensibilities influenced Sanryo's mature work. In 1924, he became a member of the the Japan Academy of Fine Arts; he received the Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts in 1962.

Sanryo's paintings are in the permanent collections of many Japanese museums, including the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto.

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Morimura Yoshine 森村宜稲 (1871-1938), Shugakuin Imperial Villa. Pigment on silk, hanging scroll, resin jikusaki. 

Yoshine , the son of a Confucian scholar, was born in Nagoya. He first studied Shijo-style painting under Kimura Unkei, later studying yamato-e under Hibino Hakkei and Kimura Kinshu. He exhibited his work often at the Bunten and Teiten exhibitions. His painting Nara Matsuri (Nara Festival) won a top prize at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Yoshine's son Yoshinaga (1906-1988) became a key figure in the 20th century revival of the yamato-e style. 

This landscape, depicting the Shugakuin Imperial Villa on the outskirts of Kyoto, demonstrates a loosening of Yoshine's Shijo technique, reflecting his interest in Western painting and the spirit of renewal around him. 

Kojima Ikkei 小島一谿 (1899-1974), Snow in Toda. Pigment on silk, 122 x 33.5 cm., hanging scroll, antler jikusaki, signed box. Signed Ikkei.

A masterly draftsman, Ikkei adapted the techniques of handling oil paint to Japanese-style landscape painting. He was born in Gifu City but spent most of his life in Yokohama. After studying oil painting at the Kawasaki Painting Research Center, he switched to Nihonga and, in 1916, became a student of the eminent painter Maeda Seison (1885-1977). With Nakashima Kiyoshi and others, he helped set up the Tsutobikai art association. A frequent participant in the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibition, Ikkei won the Japan Art Institute Award and the Encouragement Award, eventually becoming a full-fledged member of the organization.

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Shimizu Hian 清水比庵 (1883-1975), 1970-1971. Ink and pigment on paper, 44.5 x 34 cm., framed. Signed 87 years old, Hian.

In 1969, when the poet, calligrapher and painter Shimizu Hian was 86 years old, a newspaper dubbed him "the Ryokan of his time," referring to the beloved poet-monk of the Edo period.  This rather sentimental comparison overlooks how successful Hian was at incorporating the modernist influences of his era into his quintessentially Japanese art. 

A native of Okayama Prefecture, Hian graduated from Kyoto Imperial University and held a series of jobs in banking and law while pursuing poetry and painting. He studied for a time with the oil painter Matsubara Sangoro (1864-1946) and published his first poetry collection in 1929. The following year, Hian became the mayor of Nikko, a post he held for the next nine years. Though he associated with a number of eminent Nihonga painters, among them Kosugi Hoan (1881-1964) and Kawai Gyokudo (1873-1957), and showed his work widely, Hian worked outside the government sponsored exhibition system. His paintings and calligraphy have been the subject of numerous books and museum exhibitions, most recently "Shimizu Hian and the Artists of the Modern Era," at the Fukuyama Museum of Calligraphy, in 2013.

Tomita Keisen 富田渓仙 (1879-1936), Chickens, Haystack and Plow. Ink and pigment on silk, hanging scroll, antler jikusaki.

"Keisen is a remarkable artist, the likes of which only comes along every several hundred years," said the celebrated Nihonga painter Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), who invited Keisen to join the reformed Japan Art Institute in 1914. It was a good thing, too; in the Kyoto art world, the eccentric, hard-drinking Keisen had been regarded as something of a novelty.

The son of an affluent noodle merchant from Hakata (now Fukuoka City), Keisen began his training at age 12 with artists working in the Kano and literati styles. Dissatisfied with these approaches, he traveled to Kyoto at age 17 to apprentice with the innovative Shijo artist Tsuji Kako (1870-1931). By 1905, Keisen abandoned Kako's realism and precise brushwork for the looser, more exuberant style he would come to be known for. He embarked on a study of Heian-period Buddhist paintings, immersed himself in the works of the Zen painter Sengai, and travelled to Taiwan and China. Eventually he turned his attention to literati painting, replacing the traditional, patternized conventions of the genre with elements he sketched from life. Keisen died of a cerebral hemorrhage, abetted by heavy drinking, at the height of his popularity. 

Keisen combined aspects of various Japanese painting styles—literati, yamato-e, shijo, zen, rinpa—with Western expressionism to achieve his poetic effects and still-apparent originality. Today he is widely regarded as one's of Nihonga's most influential practitioners. A career retrospective of his work was held at the Kyoto Municipal Art Museum in 1996, and was accompanied by a monograph. The Fukuoka Museum of Art mounted another retrospective, commemorating the 130th anniversary of Keisen's birth, in 2009.

Ground Cherries and Ladybug by Tamamura Hokuto 玉村方久斗 (1893–1951), circa 1926-1932. Ink and pigment on gilt silk, shikishi, 27 x 24 cm., framed. Signed Hokuto.

A singular figure in the Japanese avant-garde, Tamamura Hokuto was born in the central ward of Kyoto to a family that owned a shop that sold geta, the traditional wooden sandal. He attended the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and the Kyoto Municipal Fine Arts College, where he studied with Kikuchi Hobun (1862-1918). In 1915, with classmates Okamoto Shinso (1894-1933), Kainosho Tadaoto (1894-1978), and Irie Hako (1887-1948), he founded a forward-looking Nihonga group called Mitsuritsu-kai.

After showing his work in several of the Japan Art Institute’s Inten exhibitions and moving to Tokyo, in 1918 Hokuto won the Inten's Chogyu Prize for a set of startlingly modern picture scrolls based on Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu Monogotari). He recreated them again in 1923, after the originals were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake. During this period he made many paintings based on traditional Japanese texts such as Tale of Genji and Tales of Ise. 

As the Taisho period came to an end, Hokuto lost interest in conventional Nihonga, devoting himself to avant-garde movements such as Daiichi Sakka Domei (D.S.D.), Sanka, and Tan’i Sanka (Unit Sanka). He exhibited three-dimensional works (now lost) said to resemble those of Vladimir Tatlin; inspired by the Constructivists, he sometimes signed his works with a Russified version of his birth name, Zennosuke, styling himself Zenofskey. With the help of his patron, Yoshida Nobukata of the Isshiki Kappan Printing Company, he founded the experimental art journals Epoch and GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM (G.G.P.G.). In 1930, he founded an art association named after himself—Hokuto-sha. A prolific printmaker and painter, Hokuto eventually turned his attention to contemporary everyday scenes, rendered in a grotesque and humorous style. 

Recent interest in Hokuto's work culminated in Tamamura Hokuto: Revolutionary of Japanese-Style Painting, a retrospective held in 2008 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, as well as a career-spanning monograph. 

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Iwasaki Hajin 岩崎巴人 (1917-2010), Tanuki. Ink and pigment on paper, 27 x 24 cm., framed. Signed Hajin.

A Tokyo native, Hajin attended the Kawabata painting academy in Kyoto. Afterward, he continued to study Nihonga with Kobayashi Kokei (1883-1957) and oil painting with Satomi Katsuzo (1895-1981). An early work won a prize at the 1938 Inten, where it was praised by Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958). 

After the war Hajin moved to Ibaraki Prefecture, made a Buddhist pilgrimage to India (he painted a mural in Bodhgaya), and eventually was ordained as a Zen priest. His paintings, with their unique blend of Zen-influenced brushwork, bright colors, and Western abstraction, were exhibited widely in his lifetime. In his seventies, Hajin taught ink painting on NHK Educational TV and published a popular painting manual. His work resides in many public collections in Japan, including those of the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto, and the National Museum of Art in Osaka.