Kyosai was the son of a samurai. After working for a short time as a boy with Utagawa Kuniyoshi, he received his artistic training in the Kano school, but soon abandoned the formal traditions for the greater freedom of the popular school. Kyosai must be considered one of the last great painters in the truly Japanese tradition and, for many aspects, the successor of Hokusai. He painted vigorously with a full brush, with immense bravura and skill and was active in all the conventional formats of the urban painter. He painted screens, hanging scrolls, handscrolls, albums, did designs for commercial woodblock prints, 'surimono', fans and illustrated books, and provided large numbers of illustrations for novels. Kyosai, because of his gifts as a painter, the warmth of his personality, his eccentricities and his known love for sake, was a legend in his lifetime. We have two intimate Western accounts of him at work: one by Emile Guimet, who visited him in Japan, and wrote about him in 'Promenades Japonaise' (1881); the other by Josiah Conder, the British architect, who studied painting under Kyosai in the 1880s, and who, in his 'Paintings and Studies by Kawanabe Kyosai' (1911) gave a very full account of the artist's methods. A fine collection of Kyosai's works is preserved in the British Museum. See Timothy Clark, 'Demon of Painting, the Art of Kawanabe Kyosai', exhibition catalogue, British Museum, London, 1993. |
