Yōga

Yōga is an art movement dating from 1860. The gallery holds 44 works in this movement, including works by Wu Zhen, Ni Zan and Yamaguchi Sekkei. Browse Yōga paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Yōga (洋画, literally "Western painting") is the body of work made by Japanese artists in European media—above all oil on canvas—and according to European pictorial conventions. It emerged in the Meiji period (1868–1912), when the new government, having ended more than two centuries of national seclusion, pursued rapid Westernization and treated mastery of European representation as part of modernization itself. The term was coined to distinguish such work from indigenous painting, which was reclassified in turn as nihonga ("Japanese-style painting"). Takahashi Yuichi (1828–1894), widely regarded as the first Japanese painter to work in full oil technique, was the movement's pioneer; his austere still life Salmon (c. 1877), now an Important Cultural Property, shows the new medium's appetite for solid form, weight, and tactile surface.

The state institutionalized the style in 1876 with the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō (Technical Art School), Japan's first school devoted to Western art, where the Italian painter Antonio Fontanesi—in Japan only from 1876 to 1878—taught charcoal, pastel, and oils along with anatomy, linear and atmospheric perspective, drawing from the live model, and plein-air painting. These are Yōga's defining tools: three-dimensional modeling through chiaroscuro, recession into deep illusionistic space, and naturalistic light, applied to the everyday subjects favored by contemporary French painting. A nationalist reaction soon checked it; the Kōbu school closed in 1883, and when the Tokyo School of Fine Arts opened in 1887 it taught nihonga alone.

Yōga's fortunes revived with Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924), remembered as "the father of Western-style painting," who studied in Paris under Raphaël Collin and returned in 1893 steeped in a luminous, Impressionist-inflected academicism. His Morning Toilette (1893), the first Western-style nude publicly shown in Japan, caused scandal when exhibited in 1895, while Lakeside (1897) fused European handling with a distinctly Japanese subject. With Kume Keiichirō, Kuroda founded the Hakuba-kai ("White Horse Society") in 1896 to champion the brighter "new school."

Yōga endured as one of the two great channels of modern Japanese art. Kuroda secured a Western-painting department at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1896, and the Bunten salon (from 1907) gave Yōga and nihonga equal standing. Its training shaped artists such as Hiroshi Yoshida (1876–1950), an accomplished oil and watercolor painter—represented in this collection—before he turned to the shin-hanga woodblock revival, carrying Western light and perspective into the print tradition.