Edo Period (1603-1868) paintings from Osaka have been relatively neglected in comparison with paintings from Tokyo and Kyoto. A canonical list of works and a historical framework were written up in Tokyo in the 1890s in a series of influential lectures by scholar Okakura Tenshin, setting the directions of subsequent scholarship. Osaka received scarce consideration, and it was not until the 1981 exhibition "Osaka Painting Schools in the Edo Period" at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art that interest returned. Now, a new show, "The World of Bunjinga in Early Modern Osaka" at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History till Feb. 22, takes another look, focusing on bunjinga — Japanese paintings done in the style of Chinese literati from the Song dynasty.
Kansai University art historian Nobuo Nakatani offers reasons for the inattention. When Osaka's economy collapsed during World War II, collectors stopped buying Osaka paintings and haven't returned to them since then (Nakatani has pointed out that these pieces can now be acquired at prices equivalent to "a salaryman's pocket money"). Another, earlier reason was the distinctly Chinese orientation of artists in the city — a backward-looking position — when Japan was about to modernize and its Meiji (1868-1912) government was creating slogans such as "Out of Asia, Into Europe."
China figures prominently in the coterie of artists and intellectuals who orbited the influential painter and naturalist Kimura Kenkado (1736-1802), whose work is on show in the exhibition. Born Kimura Sonsai, he became known as Kenkado, from the Japanese name of the school he later founded: Hall of the Concurrent Reed. Due to his fragile health as a youth, Kenkado was encouraged to pursue a scholarly life by his father. At age 5 or 6, he took an interest in art, and later studied with the Kano School painter Ooka Shunboku (1680- 1763), before learning flower and bird painting with the Obaku Zen priest Kakutei (whose "Yellow Birds in a Willow" is in the exhibition). This was the colorful and decorative Ming dynasty (1368-1644) style of Shen Nanpin, who visited Nagasaki from 1731-33 and established a following among locals.