Artists

Takebe Hakuhō

Takebe Hakuhō (武部白鳳, born 1871) was a painter of the Shijō school in Ōsaka. He studied at the Naniwa painting school under Nishiyama Kan'ei and was known for his landscapes.

Published on: Dec 1, 2025

Kakemono by Takebe Hakuhō: bird in the branches of a fruit tree. — Bird in a fruit tree – kakemono by Takebe Hakuhō (武部白鳳), Ōsaka (detail)

In a nutshell

Takebe Hakuhō (武部白鳳) was a Japanese painter of the Shijō school, born in 1871 in Ōsaka. His civilian name was Tōtarō; his father Takebe Hōhō worked as an illustrator during the founding period of the Asahi Shinbun. Hakuhō started out in Ukiyo-e, moved to the Naniwa painting school in 1884, and became a student of Nishiyama Kan'ei. He adopted the artist name Hakuhō from 1893 onward. Within the Ōsaka painting circle he was esteemed for his elegantly composed landscapes. His son Takebe Motoichirō also became an illustrator.

Takebe Hakuhō (武部白鳳): Shijō Painter in Meiji-Era Ōsaka

Takebe Hakuhō (武部白鳳) was born in Ōsaka in 1871; his civilian name was Tōtarō (藤太郎). He belonged to the Shijō school and was a respected figure in the Ōsaka painting circles of the Meiji and Taishō periods. Alongside Kyōto and Tōkyō, Ōsaka formed its own center with its own associations, exhibitions, and patrons – predominantly from the merchant class, which gave the painting produced there a more practical, less courtly character.

From Ukiyo-e to the Naniwa Painting School

Hakuhō's father Takebe Hōhō worked as an illustrator during the founding period of the Asahi Shinbun; the son thus grew up in an environment where drawing was a livelihood. He accordingly began with ukiyo-e and in 1884 transferred to the Naniwa Painting School (浪華画学校), one of the institutions with which the Meiji era supplemented the traditional master-pupil instruction with school-based teaching. There and afterward he was a student of Nishiyama Kan'ei. He used the artist name Hakuhō from 1893 onward; his son Takebe Motoichirō likewise became an illustrator.

Landscapes and Kachō-ga in the Shijō Painting Style

As a representative of the Shijō school, Hakuhō worked with softly graduated layers of ink and restrained color. He was known above all for calmly composed landscapes, in which pictorial depth arises through bands of mist and staggered planes rather than through perspectival construction. Alongside these are depictions of birds in fruit and flowering trees.

Mist as a Means of Pictorial Depth

The landscape painting of the Shijō school does without perspectival construction. Depth arises through staggering: one slope lies in front of the next, a band of mist pushes in between, and what lies further back becomes paler and less defined. The unpainted ground takes on this work — it is both haze and distance at once. For living spaces, such hanging scrolls are welcome, because they do not fix a particular season and do not force the eye to a single point. With Japanese hanging scrolls of this kind, it is worth comparing several pieces: the ratio of painted to open surface determines the effect in the room.