In his 1808 book, ¡°Chronicle of Audacity and Timidity¡± (¡°Tandai Shoshinroku¡°), scholar and poet Ueda Akinari satirized, ¡°When Okyo came on the scene, sketching from life (shasei) became popular, and all the paintings in Kyoto began being done by the same method!¡±
The realist impulse abetted by Okyo¡¯s shasei is the focus of ¡°Legendary Kyoto Painting From Maruyama Okyo to the Modern Era¡± at The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. While the exhibition¡¯s opening section, ¡°It All Began With Okyo,¡± indicates Okyo (1733-95) initiated a form of modernism in Kyoto painting, the works on show expose a more nuanced legacy.
The 18th-century zeitgeist for realism in Japanese painting followed three major multicultural stimuli: Shen Nanpin¡¯s (c. 1682-1760) Chinese bird and flower painting introduced during his time in Nagasaki; Western prints and book illustrations imported to Japan; and locally developing interest in recording flora and fauna in a categorical, scientific manner.
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