29 Facts About Kuroda Seiki

Viscount Kuroda Seiki was a Japanese painter and teacher, noted for bringing Western art theory and practice to a wide Japanese audience.

Kuroda Seiki arrived in Paris on March 18,1884, and was to remain there for the next decade.

Kuroda Seiki had received painting lessons in his youth, and had been given a watercolor set by his adoptive mother as a present upon leaving for Paris, but he had never considered painting as anything more than a hobby.

However, in February 1886 Kuroda Seiki was attending a party at the Japanese Legation for Japanese nationals in Paris; here, he met the painters Yamamoto Hosui and Fuji Masazo, as well as art dealer Tadamasa Hayashi, a specialist in ukiyo-e.

Kuroda Seiki agreed, and began formally studying art at a studio while simultaneously continuing his studies in law in an effort to please his adoptive father.

In May 1886, Kuroda Seiki entered the studio of Raphael Collin, a noted Academic painter who had shown work in several Paris Salons.

Kuroda Seiki received guidance from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who influenced Kuroda Seiki's later use of the human body to represent abstract concepts.

In 1886, Kuroda Seiki met another young Japanese painter, Kume Keiichiro, newly arrived in France, who joined Collin's studio.

In 1890 Kuroda Seiki moved from Paris to the village of Grez-sur-Loing, an artists' colony about 70 kilometers south of the city, which had been formed by painters from the United States and from northern Europe.

In 1893 Kuroda Seiki returned to Paris and began work on his most important painting to date, Morning Toilette, which would later become the first nude painting to be publicly exhibited in Japan.

When Kuroda Seiki returned to Japan, the best-known society for Western-style painting was the Meiji Fine Art Society, which was strongly under the influence of European Academicism and the Barbizon School, which had been introduced to Japan by the Italian artist Antonio Fontanesi at the government-funded Technical Fine Arts School [it] beginning in 1876.

Kuroda Seiki submitted several of his paintings to the Meiji Fine Arts Society's annual exhibition, which exhibited nine of his works in 1894.

Kuroda Seiki's innovative painting style, heavily influenced by the latest European plein air and Impressionist techniques, shocked Japanese audiences.

Kuroda Seiki renamed the school Tenshin Dojo and remodeled its pedagogy to focus on Western precepts and plein-air painting.

Visitors were struck by the vast differences between Kuroda Seiki's plein-air-derived style and the more formal work of the other artists, leading critics to focus on the difference as one between the old and the new.

An academic role, with its emphasis on structure and conformity, contrasted with the painter's focus on individuality, but Kuroda Seiki nonetheless approached his new role with zeal.

In particular, Kuroda Seiki stressed the importance of painting outdoors directly from nature, and insisted that courses in anatomy and the sketching of a live nude model be included in the curriculum.

Ultimately, Kuroda Seiki set as his goal the teaching of history painting, feeling that it was the most important genre for students to learn.

The painting was a large undertaking; it seems to have been among the first for which Kuroda Seiki employed charcoal drawings and oil sketches.

Kuroda Seiki would go on to employ this technique in most of his later work, teaching it to his students as well.

Kuroda Seiki was by this time well-regarded not only by the Japanese, but by the art world at large; his triptych Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment was exhibited alongside his 1897 work Lakeside at the Exposition Universelle held in 1900 in Paris; it received a silver medal.

The result was a hybrid style art historian Chinghsin Wu has termed "Academic Impressionism," which Kuroda Seiki thought was more palatable to Japanese tastes and sensibilities.

Meanwhile, Kuroda Seiki had been appointed a court painter at the Imperial Court in 1910, becoming the first yoga artist so honored.

In 1917, on the death of his father, Kuroda Seiki inherited the kazoku peerage title of viscount, and in 1920, was elected to a seat in the House of Peers, the upper house of the Diet of Japan.

In 1922, Kuroda Seiki was made head of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy.

Kuroda Seiki died at home in Azabu Kogai-cho on July 15,1924; immediately upon his death the Japanese government conferred upon him the Order of the Rising Sun.

Many students followed Kuroda Seiki in choosing to study in Paris, leading to a greater awareness of broader trends in Western art on the part of many Japanese artists in the twentieth century; a number of these, such as Asai Chu, even went as far as going to Grez-sur-Loing for inspiration.

In particular, the "Academic Impressionism" style that Kuroda Seiki promoted, as exemplified in iconic paintings such as Lakeside and Lilies, achieved a long-lasting predominance within Japanese art society, forming the bedrock of modern, Western-style art training and practice in Japan for many decades to come.

Two of Kuroda Seiki's works have been selected as the subject of a commemorative postage stamps by the Japanese government:.