Mori Getsujō
Table of contents
Mori Getsujō (森月城): From the School of Takeuchi Seihō
Mori Getsujō (森月城) was a Japanese Nihonga painter in Kyōto. He entered the painting school of Takeuchi Seihō, with the circle around the painter Miki Suizan establishing the contact. He thus belongs to the generation trained in Kyōto around the turn of the century, which combined the Shijō tradition with impulses from European painting.
Getsujō or Shingetsujō? On the Reading
The three characters 森月城 are occasionally contracted to Shingetsujō, whereby the first character is taken in its Sino-Japanese reading and read as part of the artist's name rather than as the family name. In both cases the same painter is meant: Mori is the family name, Getsujō the gō.
The Chikujōkai and Its Students
Takeuchi Seihō was the defining figure of Kyōto painting of his time. His painting school, the Chikujōkai, produced numerous painters who shaped the Kyōto art world of the Taishō and Shōwa periods – among them Tokuoka Shinsen. What Seihō passed on was less a style than an attitude toward observing nature: close observation, but without the intention of merely depicting what was seen.
Grapevine and Chipmunk
Grapevines with a small animal among them belong to those motifs that make no solemn claim. The chipmunk between the leaves brings movement and a touch of the incidental, while the vine gives the picture its structure: it runs diagonally across the surface and orders the pictorial space without filling it. Motivically, such a Kakemono belongs to late summer and early autumn, when the grapes ripen.
