In the drive to modernize Japanese art in the 19th century, artists frequently attempted to create a fusion of Eastern and Western styles of painting. But what at first sight seemed to be radical combinations of the two, now actually appear to be more happily at home within pre-existing Japanese traditions.
Take Tamura Soryu, for example. Soryu studied art under a Buddhist priest before learning oil painting from an Englishman, Charles Wirgman, in Yokohama. In his painting "Dragon King" (Late Meiji Period), showing at "Modern Art in Wanderings: In Between Japanese and Western Style Paintings" at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto till Feb. 25, a Buddhist deity brings rain in response to prayers by the Japanese monk Kukai. The hands and face are rendered in compelling Western-style realism, the robes in the traditional patterning of Japanese painting, and the background in sumi ink. The fullness of the figure and the flatness of the clothing do not cohere, nor do the clearly delineated body and the murky background.
The result was a false start in creating a new Japanese painting idiom, as it really represents a late point in Buddhist portraiture, which has a long tradition of combining realism and flat-looking clothing designs. There were, however, a great many successes in modernizing Japanese painting.