HISHIDA Shunso

Native placeChikuma (Nagano), JPN
Birth1874
Dead placeYoyogi, Tokyo, JPN
Died1911

Biography

Shunso was born in Iida, Nagano Prefecture. He traveled to Tokyo in 1888 and studied Japanese-style painting there with Yuki Somei. In 1890 he entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Kawabata Gyokusho. He graduated from the school in 1895, and the following year he became a teacher there. Under the direction of Okakura Tenshin, he worked with Yokoyama Taikan, Shimomura Kanzan, and others to develop the new potential of Japanese-style painting. A dispute at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts led Tenshin to resign as head of the school, and Shunso then participated in the founding of the Japan Art Institute. While studying the classics, around 1899 he began to discard the linear expression of traditional painting and drew on Western-style painting in his use of shaded color fields as he experimented with the so-called moro-tai (fuzzy style) form of blurred expression. This style was not well received in the art world of the day, and along with Yokoyama Taikan, who was also experimenting with the style, Shunso went through a period of bad luck. However, during this period, Shunso gradually broke free from the constraints of moro-tai and developed his own style, as seen in his work “Fallen Leaves,” which fuses color and linear effects into a lovely form.

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