Nihonga

Nihonga is an art movement dating from 1860. The gallery holds 411 works in this movement, including works by Sesson Shūkei, Kaihō Yūsetsu and Soga Shōhaku. Browse Nihonga paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Nihonga (日本画, literally "Japanese painting") names not an ancient tradition but a deliberately modern one: the term was coined in the early Meiji period to set painting in indigenous materials and formats apart from the Western-style oil painting (yōga) flooding Japan's new art schools after the country opened to the West. By the 1880s traditional painting was being dismissed as backward, and its revival was led by an unlikely pair—the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa and the critic Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin), often called the father of modern Japanese art. Together they founded the Kangakai (Painting Appreciation Society) in 1884 and helped establish the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō, opened 1889); in 1898 Okakura broke away to form the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute), which became Nihonga's spiritual home.

What unites Nihonga is technique rather than subject. Painters work in iwa-enogu—powdered mineral pigments ground from malachite (green), azurite (blue), and cinnabar (red)—bound with nikawa, an animal-hide glue, on supports of washi paper or silk, often laid over gold or silver leaf. The coarseness of the grind governs the colour's texture and luminosity, and pigment is placed in thin, fully dried layers rather than brushed. Nihonga consciously drew on the classical schools it sought to preserve: the bold decorative design of Rinpa (epitomised by Ogata Kōrin's celebrated "Irises at Yatsuhashi"), the ink discipline of the Kanō school, and the scholarly literati manner of nanga masters such as Ike no Taiga.

The movement's first generation bridged old and new. Kanō Hōgai (1828–1888) and Hashimoto Gahō (1835–1908) carried Kanō training into a modern idiom, while Okakura's pupils Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958) and Hishida Shunsō (1874–1911) pioneered mōrōtai, a "hazy" lineless style built from atmospheric washes of colour—initially derided, later embraced. Shunsō's silk painting "Black Cat" (Kuroki neko, 1910), now an Important Cultural Property, marks its maturity. In Kyoto, Takeuchi Seihō and the bijinga specialist Uemura Shōen developed a parallel, more naturalistic current.

Nihonga endures as the counterweight to yōga in modern Japanese art, a living tradition that reinvented heritage rather than merely conserving it.