Kawanabe Kyōsai

Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889) worked as a painter and caricaturist during a period of immense change in Japan, living through the end of the Edo period and into the Meiji era. Art historian Timothy Clark described him as "an individualist and an independent, perhaps the last virtuoso in traditional Japanese painting." Born in Koga to a samurai father, Kyōsai had a startling introduction to life at age nine when he picked up a severed human head from the Kanda River. He briefly studied under ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi before receiving formal training in the Kanō school under Maemura Tōwa, who nicknamed him "The Painting Demon." Kyōsai soon left these formal traditions for the greater freedom of popular art. During the political upheaval surrounding the 1867 revolution, he became known as a caricaturist; his long handscroll "The battle of the farts" is thought to parody this turmoil. He was arrested three times and imprisoned by shogunate authorities. After Emperor Meiji took power, Kyōsai attended a large congress of painters and writers, then produced another caricature that was hugely popular but landed him in police custody—this time under the new regime.

His partnership with writer Kanagaki Robun began when Robun, covering the 1855 Edo earthquake the day after it struck, met Kyōsai and used his sketch of a catfish to accompany the text. That image became Kyōsai’s first single-sheet ukiyo-e woodblock print, and its success led Robun to publish a series of similar catfish pictures called namazu-e. In 1874, Kyōsai and Robun created what is considered Japan’s first manga magazine, *Eshinbun Nipponchi*, which was heavily influenced by Charles Wirgman’s *Japan Punch* but lasted only three issues due to its simple drawings and lack of popularity. Kyōsai’s daughter, Kawanabe Gyōsui, became a notable eccentric artist, teaching nihonga at Joshibi University, producing prints based on Edo-era works, triptychs in the style of Toyohara Chikanobu, and bird-and-flower paintings in the 1930s.

Kyōsai is widely regarded as the greatest successor to Hokusai (though he was never Hokusai’s pupil) and Japan’s first political caricaturist. His work mirrored his life—wild and undisciplined, sometimes reflecting his fondness for drink. While he lacked Hokusai’s dignity, power, or reticence, he made up for it with a fantastic exuberance that gave interest to his technically excellent draughtsmanship. Beyond caricatures, he painted many pictures and sketches, often drawing on Japanese folklore, Noh plays, nature, and religion—works like *The Temptation of Shaka Niorai* or *The Goddess Kwannon on a dragon*. A fine collection is held at the British Museum, with other examples at the National Art Library in South Kensington and the Guimet Museum in Paris. The Kawanabe Kyōsai Memorial Museum opened in 1977 in Warabi, Saitama Prefecture. According to Erwin Bälz’s diary, Kyōsai died of gastric cancer. A crater on Mercury has been named in his honor.

Kyōsai wrote his own key biography and painting manual, *Kyōsai Gadan* (Kyōsai’s Treatise on Painting), which is half autobiography and half manual. Another important contemporary biography is *Kawanabe Kyōsai-ō den* by Iijima Kyoshin, finished in 1899 but published only in 1984. Western visitors also left substantial memoirs, notably Émile Étienne Guimet’s *Promenades japonaises* (1880) and Josiah Conder’s *Paintings and Studies by Kawanabe Kyōsai* (1911). Conder, a serious student of Japanese art, became Kyōsai’s pupil after initial rejections and stayed with him for ten years until the master’s death. The most accessible modern English reference is Timothy Clark’s *Demon of Painting: the Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai* (1993).