Kawasaki Shōko (川崎小虎): from Yamato-e to the small motif
Kawasaki Shōko (川崎小虎, 1886–1977) was a Japanese Nihonga painter. He was born in Gifu and originally bore the name Nakano Ryūichi; he later adopted the family name Kawasaki. His path led from the courtly pictorial tradition to a deliberately modest painting style – a development characteristic of Japanese painting of the 20th century as a whole.
The grandfather's Yamato-e
Shōko's grandfather was the painter Kawasaki Chitora, who instructed him in Yamato-e already as a child – that classical Japanese pictorial tradition with opaque color, clear contour, and literary pictorial themes. After Chitora's death in 1902, Shōko continued his training under Kobori Tomoto, who belonged to the same school. In 1910 he graduated from the Tōkyō School of Fine Arts.
Transformation of the work and influence on Higashiyama Kaii
At first Shōko worked in the lyrical Yamato-e manner of his teachers. Over the years, more human themes moved into the foreground, and in old age, small motifs from nature and the animal world – a blossom, an insect, a bird. In 1961 he was awarded the Prize of the Imperial Academy. His eldest daughter married Higashiyama Kaii, the most important Japanese landscape painter of the postwar period; Shōko's outlook influenced the latter's later work.
Hibiscus and grasshopper: the image of late summer
The hibiscus blooms in late summer, and each blossom lasts only a day – a circumstance that makes it, in the Japanese pictorial tradition, an emblem of impermanence. A grasshopper beside it sets the scale and brings the time of day into the picture: it belongs to the hours when the heat subsides. Such motifs demand little effort and great precision, and they are hung in the tokonoma for the weeks between midsummer and the beginning of autumn.
