Untitled by Kawanabe Kyōsai 河鍋暁斎

This is Kawanabe Kyōsai's Dancing Figures, made in 1878 with ink on paper. It is now in a private collection.

Kyōsai painted three dancers mid-leap. The billowing sleeve on the left figure is a single virtuoso brush passage, ink loaded once and released with a speed that reads cloth weight and air resistance simultaneously. The faces are theatrical masks drawn with almost no strokes at all: an open mouth, an eyebrow, done. You can see the painter's hand moving across the paper.

Kyōsai was born in 1831 and trained in the Kano school, the official painting tradition of the Tokugawa shogunate. By the time he made this work, the shogun was gone, the Meiji emperor was on the throne, and Japan was importing cameras, telegraphs, and Western oil painting. Kyōsai chose ink instead. Art historian Timothy Clark called him 'the last virtuoso in traditional Japanese painting,' and that is not a small claim, it means he could do things with a brush that younger artists were already beginning to lose.

The date 1878 matters. Early wet-plate photography in Japan required subjects to hold still for several seconds. You could photograph a posed portrait, a temple gate, a dead samurai. You could not photograph three dancers in midair. Kyōsai could, and did, and left the photograph to catch up.