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日本画
Nihonga became a category in Meiji Japan in distinction to Western-style painting, yōga. Paper, silk, ink, pigments and animal glue connect it with older practices, while art schools and exhibitions helped reshape what artists made.
Shihon means a paper support; kenpon means silk. Their different surfaces affect absorption, lines and colour. Silk can also be coloured from the reverse, and metal leaf can enter the picture. Support is separate from mounting: a painting may become a scroll, screen or panel.
Paper and silk can draw liquid into their fibres. Dōsa, a sizing solution containing glue and alum, forms a thin film that reduces absorption and bleeding. In Musashino Art University’s paired samples, the pale stroke has a more feathered edge without sizing and a more contained edge after treatment.
The concentration and amount depend on the support and the desired result. Sizing need not eliminate every soft edge. These photographs demonstrate one comparison, rather than a recipe that every painter must follow.
Mineral pigments are ground and sorted by particle size. Within a given colour, coarser grains often appear deeper and finer ones paler, although the raw material also matters. Gofun is commonly made from shells; ink uses soot and glue. These materials are not all one kind of mineral powder.
Dry particles need an adhesive. The painter mixes pigment with glue dissolved in warm water. After application, water evaporates while glue remains, securing the particles to paper or silk. Water helps the mixture flow; it does not perform the glue’s binding function.
Ink tones, pigment layers, metal leaf and brush outlines offer different means of expression. Landscape, figures and birds-and-flowers classify subjects. A mountain or an apparent absence of shading cannot by itself identify nihonga; the work’s technique, artist and setting matter.
Kyoto University of the Arts describes a common sequence of sketching, small compositional studies, a full-size preparatory drawing and painting. Small studies test composition, tonal balance and colour. The full-size drawing prepares the final work. Artists and projects vary, so this is a working method rather than a compulsory recipe.
A full-size preparatory drawing must be positioned on the painting support. Thin, translucent paper or silk may allow the outline underneath to be traced through. Thick paper, board and walls require another approach: nenshi, a prepared transfer sheet, can be placed between the drawing and the opaque surface.
Tracing pressure transfers pigment from the sheet below. This solves a practical problem—placing an outline where the support cannot be seen through. Painting nenshi differs from ordinary oil- or wax-based carbon paper.
Hishida Shunsō left Beauty in the Rain unfinished in 1910. Iida City Museum describes ink, charcoal and pencil underdrawing, with colour begun on only one woman’s face and clothing. The surviving work brings outline placement and partial colouring together, making a stage between preparation and completion visible.
This is evidence from one painting, rather than a universal sequence.
Before Meiji, painters were associated with traditions such as the Kanō and Maruyama-Shijō schools. Nihonga became a broader label as oil painting entered modern art institutions. Yamatane Museum places its wider adoption around the late 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century, rather than treating it as an ancient unified category.
The Tokyo Fine Arts School, founded in 1887, and developing art organizations and exhibitions brought painters from different traditions into contact. Artists also adopted methods from Western painting. Hashimoto Gahō and Yokoyama Taikan belong to this history of education and changing practice, rather than an untouched continuation of one old school.
Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunsō experimented with reducing explicit outlines so that colour, light and atmosphere could shape forms. Critics called such work mōrōtai, or a hazy style. This concerned how an image was constructed; it did not mean that all Nihonga abandoned drawn contours.
Hishida Shunsō’s Spring Colours (1905, colour on silk) places fine tree trunks in a pale woodland, with brighter white blossoms below. Toyota Municipal Museum of Art connects its softened outlines with dry-brush work and the painter’s investigation of light and atmosphere.
The ground around the roots remains ambiguous: it is difficult to settle on sand or a water’s edge. Space emerges without a firm boundary separating ground from background.
Nihon Bijutsuin was founded in 1898 under Okakura Tenshin’s guidance, with painters including Hashimoto Gahō and Yokoyama Taikan; Taikan and others revived it in 1914. Another exhibition sequence ran from Bunten in 1907 through Teiten in 1919 and Shin Bunten in 1937 to Nitten from 1946. These settings connected the presentation of paintings with modern art institutions.
Sugiyama Yasushi, Higashiyama Kaii and Takayama Tatsuo continued to engage with European painting and abstraction after the war. Materials also changed. Nitten’s guide places the development of large, strong sheets of washi in the Shōwa period and the diversification of artificial mineral pigments around 1955.
Glass-based and other manufactured pigments expanded the available colours and grain sizes. The choices cannot be reduced to natural minerals versus Western paint. Works by artists such as Okumura Togyū in the Yamatane collection likewise show varied approaches to material and form.
Sugiyama Yasushi’s Heaven (Kyū, 1964) sets a centrally placed sphinx head against blue. The Agency for Cultural Affairs’ commentary describes its canvas surface as built with casein and sand and connects the work with his 1962 visit to Egypt.
The silk of Shunsō’s Spring Colours and Sugiyama’s canvas demonstrate different supports and pictorial decisions within the modern category. Materials matter, but the artist’s practice, exhibitions and historical setting also help explain why a work is discussed as Nihonga.
Hiroshi Senju’s practice includes fusuma paintings for Philadelphia’s Shofuso in 2007. His university profile also records participation in overseas biennials. Such commissions and exhibitions show nihonga operating beyond Japan; the material, setting and commission of each work still require individual attention.
No. It is an art category with a modern institutional history.
It binds pigment particles to the support.
Paper and silk supports.
No. Its modern development involved exchange.
No. The modern label spread in Meiji Japan.
The glue remains as the binder, securing the pigment particles to the support. Water makes mixing and brushwork possible but is not the adhesive.
A thick or opaque support hides the drawing underneath. Pressure on a transfer sheet deposits pigment, positioning the outline without seeing through the surface.
They compare absorption and bleeding in one pair of samples. They do not establish a fixed concentration or recipe for every support and painter.
No. The 1905 painting concerns a Meiji-period experiment in contours and atmosphere; the later pigments represent a subsequent change in available materials.
