19. Maruyama Ôkyo and Shiba Kôkan: Exploring European Visualities in the Edo Period

note: Japanese names are read family name first, personal name second (i.e., Maruyama is the family name, Okyo is the first name; together they are read just like Simpson Bart).   Japanese artists before the Meiji period (late 19 th -century) are known primarily by their first names.

Maruyama Ôkyo 円山応挙 (1733-95)

Myriad Animals.   Two 6-fold screens.   Ink, color, paper; 168.5 x 364.8 cm.

            Compare with:

•  Tohaku's Tiger .   1606.   One of a pair of six-fold screens.   Ink, paper; 153.1 x 335 cm.

•  Edward Hicks.   Peaceable Kingdom.   1834.   Oil, canvas; 29 3/8 x 35 1/2 inches.

innovations:

•    “eyeglass pictures” (megane-e 眼鏡繪)

Viewed with the use of an “optique” (nozoki karakuri のぞきからくり).   This was a device whereby the picture inserted into the back was first reflected in a mirror and then enlarged by a magnifying lens in order to exaggerate the persepctive and chiraoscuro and to produce a three-dimensional landscape with a feeling of realism

•  Archery Contest at Sanjûsangendô ( Sanjûsangendô tooshiyazu 三十三間堂通し矢図 ). 1759.   Paper; 20.5 x 26.7 cm.

•  Riverbed at Shijô (local Kyoto site)

•  Hozu River, 1795

•  detailed illustrations of nature

Inspired in part by imported Chinese materia medica books of pharmacology (honzôgaku 本草学).   Ôkyo's teacher, Watanabe Shiko 渡辺始興, did a series of animal studies which Ôkyo copied.

• Pine Trees in Snow (Yukimatsu byôbu 雪松屏風 ) pair of 6-panel screens. Late 18th -century.   Ink, light color, gold, paper; each screen 61 x 143 in. [Mason, fig. 372]

•  representations of the body

Unlike any of the earlier representations of the body in Japanese art (the body as primitive, diseased, foreign, or erotic) Ôkyo for the first time attempts to paint the body with anatomical correctness in genre paintings

• Album of figure paintings (Jinbutsu seisha sôhon 人物正写惣本). 1770.   3 scrolls.    Paper, light color; H: 31.4 cm.

Shiba Kôkan 司馬江漢 (1738-1818).

Foreign Man on a Pier ( Ikoku fûkei jinbutsuzu 異国風景人物図 ). 1790.   Oil on silk; 114.8 x 55.6 cm.

Compare with Caspar David Friedrich.   Man Looking Over a Sea of Fog.   1818. Oil on canvas.

Barrelmakers.   1789. Hanging scroll, oil on silk; 19 x 24 in.   [Mason, fig. 370]