Since art historian Nobuo Tsuji published¡°Kiso no Keifu¡± in 1970 (an English version was released as ¡°Lineage of Eccentrics¡± in 2012), broad attention has refocused on a number of Edo Period (1603-1868) individualist painters such Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800) and Soga Shohaku (1730-81), making their works tremendously popular today. These painters forged independent careers outside the usual school affiliation frameworks, employing highly expressive styles and meticulous brushwork. The recent rehabilitation of Yokoyama Kazan¡¯s (1781/4-1837) oeuvre in ¡°Kazan: A Superb Imagination at Work,¡± the painter¡¯s first full-scale retrospective at The Museum of Kyoto, suggests that Kazan may be absorbed into that lineage.

Kazan¡¯s painting vocation began through copying the works of the Edo Period eccentric, Shohaku. His personal study of those paintings can be given comparative scrutiny in the pairing of Shohaku¡¯s ¡°The Daoist Immortal Liu Haichan (Xia Ma, Gama)¡± (18th century) with Kazan¡¯s 19th-century adaption with the same title. Shohaku¡¯s pictorial instruction was close at hand because Kazan¡¯s family, involved in Kyoto¡¯s Nishijin district fabric industry, patronized Shohaku, as Shohaku¡¯s ¡°Letter Addressed to Yokoyama Kihee VI¡± (18th century) attests.

The exhibition structure is careful to position Shohaku¡¯s influence as a prologue to Kazan¡¯s later achievements. Kazan did, however, take formal artistic training with Kishi Ganku (1749-1838), the progenitor of the Kishi school of Kyoto painters. From Ganku, Kazan learned his teacher¡¯s realistic and ferocious thematic specialty ¡ª tigers, as in ¡°Tiger Screens¡± (19th century). And from his personal study of the works of the Shijo school painter, Matsumura Goshun (1752-1811), he took up the aesthetics and Chinese themes of Japanized literati painting in works like ¡°Eight Drunken Immortals¡± (19th century).