和田英作

Wada Eisaku was born in 1874 in Tarumizu Village, Kimotsuki District, Kagoshima Prefecture (now Tarumizu City). After his father, Hidetoyo, a pastor of the Episcopal Church, was engaged to teach English at the Imperial Naval Academy, the family moved to Tokyo in 1878, when Eisaku was three. He graduated from the Shiba Ward Tomoe Primary School in 1887, before entering Meiji Gakuin and being taught the fundamentals of Yōga (Western-style painting) by Uesugi Kumamatsu, the school’s art teacher. Uesugi had studied with the Italian painter Achille Sangiovanni at the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō (Technical Fine Arts School). In April 1890, while visiting the Third National Industrial Exhibition, the 15-year-old saw a number of paintings that solidified his desire to pursue a career in Yōga, including “Kiryū Kannon” (Kannon Bodhisattva Riding the Dragon) by Harada Naojirō, “Musha Shikoku” (Aiming at the Target) by Soyama Sachihiko, and “Hagoromo Tennyo” (The Heavenly Maiden in the Legend of Hagoromo) by Honda Kinkichirō. In January of the next year, he dropped out of Meiji Gakuin and began taking private lessons from Uesugi, who introduced him that April to Soyama Sachihiko’s painting school, where his fellow students included Okada Saburōsuke, Nakazawa Hiromitsu, Miyake Kokki, and Yazaki Chiyoji. Following Soyama’s sudden death in January 1892, Eisaku transferred to Harada Naojirō’s art school Shōbikan. Meanwhile, he exhibited oil paintings at the Meiji Art Association (Meiji Bijutsukai) and also studied Nihonga under Kubota Beisen of the Maruyama School. After Harada became ill, Wada shifted again in 1894 to Tenshin Dōjō, the art school run by Kuroda Seiki and Kume Keichirō, who had both returned from France the previous year. Kuroda himself took up painting in earnest in the late 1880s while staying in Paris, and the expression of outdoor light he acquired there was new to Japan. Wada left a record of his first impressions: “When I visited Mr. Kuroda in his studio and he showed me his works, I felt a sense of joy, as if he had opened the curtain marking the boundary between heaven and earth, something I had never dreamed of was possible.” Kuroda’s brightly colored images seemed almost dazzling to artists used to the established approach to oil painting, which came to be known as the “Yani-ha” (Resin School) in reference to its dominant brownish color tones. Many Yōga painters of Wada’s generation were shocked by the paintings Kuroda brought back from France. In June 1896, a group who felt dissatisfied with the old ways of expression gathered around Kuroda to form the Hakubakai, Wada included. In September that year, on being appointed head of a new department of Western-style painting at Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo Fine Arts School, now Tokyo University of the Arts), Kuroda showed his high regarded for Wada by making him an assistant professor. Feeling somehow conflicted, however, Wada resigned from the position the following February and enrolled as a fourth-year student in the same department where he had taught. He immediately set to work on his graduation project, “Sunset at the Ferry” (Tokyo University of the Arts), which he exhibited at the Second Hakubakai Exhibition in October. Depicting a farmer and his family waiting for a ferry at sunset on the banks of the broad Tama River, the large-size work is still rated one of his major accomplishments. The group portrait’s expression of a pastoral nostalgia easily shared by the viewer is akin to the genre-painting approach of “Mukashi Gatari” (Talk on Ancient Romance) (1897, now lost) by his contemporary Kuroda. After again accepting the post of assistant professor, Wada left for Berlin in August 1899 to assist in cataloguing the Japanese art collection of Adolf Fischer, an Austrian met through Kuroda. While in Germany, he was instructed by the Japanese Ministry of Education to undertake a course of study in Paris and moved there the following March. He became a pupil of Raphaël Collin, who once taught Kuroda, and developed his skills by copying works by Jean-François Millet, Camille Corot, and other artists exhibited at the Louvre. Along with Asai Chū, another instructor from Tokyo Fine Arts School, Wada spent considerable time painting in Grez-sur-Loing, a commune not far from Paris. Among other compatriots he befriended while in France were Kanokogi Takeshirō, an adherent of the old-school painting style, and the architectural historian Tsukamoto Yasushi. The reward of his European studies was promotion to a full professorship on his return to Japan in July 1903. As an instructor at Tokyo Fine Arts School, Wada set about implementing the kind of art education Kuroda was determined to establish. He can be regarded as Kuroda’s legitimate successor, indicated by the fact that after the artist’s death in 1924, he was instrumental in compiling the volume on Kuroda’s posthumous works. Wada continued mentoring younger artists at the school for a long period, until resigning his post in 1936. During the last four years especially, while he was principal, he needed all his energies to navigate through a period of confusion and friction with the authorities, notably the so-called Matsuda Kaiso (the Matsuda Reorganization), an abortive attempt by the Minister of Education Matsuda Genji to impose a nationalist blueprint on art. Wada’s own works were shown mainly at the national exhibitions, namely the Bunten (Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition), which had started in 1907, and the later Teiten (Imperial Fine Arts Academy Exhibition). Concerning Kuroda’s life-long efforts to establish academism, with the national art schools and exhibitions at its apex, it is usual to emphasize that Wada inherited his mentor’s mantle. The associated cliché is that Wada became a painter who turned his back on the new waves of Western art that started flowing into Japan from the 1910s, and that he did not dare go beyond Kuroda. Certainly, compared to the 1890s, when he produced works brimming with fresh sensibilities in his twenties, he seemed reluctant, after becoming prominent in Yōga and art education circles, to take on new challenges in the commissioned portraits, landscapes, and still lifes marked by a solid realism that he now turned out. Nevertheless, it should be noted that, during the first two decades of the century, Wada also produced a considerable number of large-scale, architectural decorative paintings. They included: the mural in 1908 for the ballroom of the Takanawa residence of Iwasaki Yanosuke (today’s Kaitō-kaku); the entertainment room mural at Kōjunsha (1908); the ceiling painting “Hagoromo” at the Imperial Theatre (1911); the mural of the smoking room of the Tōgū Palace (Akasaka Palace) (now East Room of the State Guest House, 1914); the wall painting “Umi no Sachi Yama no Sachi” (The Fruit of Mountain and the Sea) (1914) in the central hall of the imperial entrance of Central Station (now Tokyo Station); the wall painting “Hiyakumono Zoroi Sen’nin Musha Gyōretsu” (One Thousand Samurai in Procession) (1915) in Hōmotsukan of Nikkō Tōshō-gū; and the stairwell mural (1917) at the Yokohama City Port Opening Memorial Hall. These could not have been realized without his skill at organizing graduates of the Western-style painting department of Tokyo Fine Arts School to assist or his ability to conceive and tackle large compositions. Regrettably, many of the decorative works were destroyed by fire in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and the Second World War or have become inaccessible to the public. In recent years, however, they have been subject to ongoing research and reevaluation. His preference for large-scale public paintings decorating a space similarly comes through in the 1918 history painting “Hekiga Rakkei no Zu” (Celebration of the Completion of the Kondō) (Hōryū-ji, Nara), based on the Kondō murals of Hōryū-ji Temple, and his 1940 copy in oils of one of the Kondō murals. In April 1945, toward the end of the war, Wada evacuated from his Tokyo residence in Kōgai-chō, Azabu-ku (part of today’s Minato-ku) to Chiryū-chō (now Chiryū City), Aichi Prefecture to escape the firebombing. After Japan’s surrender, he moved to Miho, Shizuoka Prefecture (in today’s Shimizu-ku, Shizuoka City). During the latter part of his career, he produced a series of subdued works on seemingly mundane subjects, such as roses and Mt. Fuji, while adopting a steady-as-you-go approach. Consequently, he was disparaged by some observers as “Bara-Fuji-tarō (Rose-Fuji-tarō).” Old-school forms of expression, acquired prior to his encounter with Kuroda, and a preference for uniquely Japanese subjects had been present, nevertheless, throughout his career. In the 1920s, for instance, he produced a history painting on the theme of the 8th-century Tenpyō era, which could be regarded as anachronistic, and, as already mentioned, after retiring from Tokyo Fine Arts School, he copied the Horyū-ji Kondō murals. Moreover, in his late years, he told acquaintances that he wished to create a painting of the Hagoromo legend connected to Miho, his place of residence. In addition to subjects associated with his personal life, Wada never lost his orientation toward grand narratives from the nation’s history. It could be said that he was an oil painter with a hidden breadth difficult to recognize at first glance. While he no doubt fully trusted and respected Kuroda, his outlook as an artist was also nourished by what he learned from Soyama and Harada, before encountering Kuroda, and by his heartfelt friendship for Asai and Kanokogi, both representatives of the old approach to Yōga, after his appointment to Tokyo Fine Arts School. (Kaizuka Tsuyoshi / Translated by Ota So & Walter Hamilton) (Published online: 2024-03-08)