The art worlds of the Edo (1615–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods were vibrant communities full of innovation and transformation. Constant change marks a healthy artistic climate in which artists can flourish. They look to the past for inspiration and to the future to innovate. Changes transform the past into a memory, which can then be modified to suit an artist's or patron's agenda. Contemporary art historical work excavates the past so we can more fully understand the changes that new works of art made within their own historical context.

Three recent books by Japanese art historians address transformations in art during the Edo and early Meiji periods. Morgan Pitelka and Alice Y. Tseng's edited volume Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods presents seven papers that look at Kyoto during moments of transitions. Yukio Lippit's edited volume The Artist in Edo offers several perspectives on artists and their activities during the Edo period. In Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting, Chelsea Foxwell examines the development of Nihonga style and its relationship to Edo period art at the very beginning of the Meiji period. Taken together, these three books map ways of reconsidering artists and markets in early modern and modern Japan.

Foxwell's book explores the meaning of Nihonga style through the lens of Kano Hōgai and his adaptation to the new art world being created in Meiji-period Japan. She focuses her work on the period from the 1860s to the 1880s. By looking backwards to the Edo period she is able to demonstrate not only substantial changes but also important continuities across the Edo/Meiji divide of 1868. She focuses on Tokyo and the transnational nature of early Meiji modern art production. Japanese distinctiveness, foreign collecting, and the demands of modern museum exhibitions are all central themes of her argument.

Foxwell's first chapter examines transformations in exhibitions brought about by changes in patronage, artistic schools, and the growing public sphere of the early Meiji period. She seeks to show that the new types of exhibitions held during the Meiji period reframed how works of art (and other objects) were perceived by and presented to audiences who were already used to public spectacles during the Edo period.

Her second chapter delves further into the influence international exhibitions and collectors, such as Ernest Fenollosa and Edward Morse, had on the display and production of Japanese works of art domestically and abroad. Exhibition objects that were created for these fairs merged finely crafted forms with subjects that directly addressed Japanese culture—often mediated for a foreign audience. These objects could function as both Japanese and Western works of art.

In the third chapter, Foxwell begins her careful study of Kano Hōgai, paying specific attention to how painting production changed over his career. As she explains in the introduction to the book, it is productive to restudy Hōgai rather than pursue new research on less well-known Meiji artists in order to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the development of Nihonga and its reaction to foreign demand. She successful argues for the creativity of Hōgai's style and the impact of his shift from elite samurai patronage to that of the American Fenollosa.

The fourth chapter narrows the focus to Nihonga style as it developed in Tokyo, specifically in response to the need for paintings designed primarily for exhibition. As such, Nihonga began to transcend traditional painting schools. Close studies of Kawanabe Kyōsai's Winter Crow on a Branch (1881) and Hōgai's Hotei with Children (1882) support her argument that public exhibition was a crucial factor in the development of Nihonga.

Chapter 5 takes on the fascinating question of naturalism in Nihonga through the example of Hōgai's Hawks in the Ravine (ca. 1885), which was brought to Boston by William Sturgis Bigelow likely by 1890, after it won second place in an 1885 exhibition in Japan. Naturalism presents a quandary for this painting because Foxwell argues that the birds can also be read as eagles. More than just a taxonomic difference in species, the distinction between hawks and eagles contains iconographic meaning, especially in the context of a Meiji painting sent overseas. Foxwell convincingly demonstrates that the slippage from “eagle” in Japan to “hawk” in the United States (and later deemphasis of the species altogether) speaks to negotiating the multiple audiences of Nihonga.

Chapter 6 explores the meaning of Nihonga through transmission and copying in the 1880s, returning to its relationship with pre-Meiji painting addressed earlier in the book. She makes the distinction between “transmission” and “tradition.” Copies of the Hikone screen, especially by Shibata Zeshin, illustrate copying and reinvention as a means of maintaining an artistic connection to the past consistent with modernity. Foxwell concludes that Nihonga works of art were closely connected to works of the past not because they were derivative, but because Nihonga was created within a dialogue with earlier works of art.

Overall, Foxwell demonstrates the impact of changing patronage in the Meiji period and the influence of foreign expectations, some challenged through domestic actors, on the development of Nihonga. She attributes the characteristics of Nihonga as dependent upon the expected public display of these paintings within a context that needed them to be both “Japanese” and “modern.” The vitality of the period she discusses is later lost as Nihonga and Yōga (Western-style painting) are forced into opposition with each other. Her work will help transform how we understand Nihonga style.

In their edited volume, Pitelka and Tseng examine two moments of transition for Kyoto at the beginning and end of the Edo period. Kyoto suffered politically during both transitions—through losing its status as the military capital of the country with Ieyasu's dominance from Edo (although Pitelka's other work has shown how critical Kyoto remained for Ieyasu)Footnote ¹ and again losing its status as the imperial capital at the beginning of the Meiji period when the emperor moved to the newly renamed Tokyo. Both periods presented challenges for the city to redefine itself and argue for its relevancy. As political power left Kyoto, social capital and soft power became more important for it. Nostalgia and a memory of its past dominance helped to craft new ways of articulating its relevancy.

Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods is divided into two sections, with an introduction and an epilogue. In their introduction, Pitelka and Tseng present the volume as a study of “two periods of political marginalization” (Pitelka and Tseng, p. 1). In both the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, power shifted away from Kyoto towards Edo/Tokyo. Although Kyoto began each period in a different position relative to national politics, at each moment it had something to lose as more power shifted to Edo/Tokyo. What Kyoto continued to have was a “powerful politics of time” (Pitelka and Tseng, p. 3) that relied on a memory of its past as the ancient capital. However, they do not place Edo/Tokyo and Kyoto in opposition to each other; rather, each city flourishes in its own sphere.

Part one interrogates the beginning of the Edo period, as culture and society in Kyoto adjust to the military political center returning to the east. Pitelka explores the activities of Koburi Enshū (1579–1647) as a cultural hybrid within Kyoto. Enshū was an administrator for the shogunal government in Kyoto, and Pitelka argues that his work in Kyoto on behalf of the shogun marked a cultural intrusion by the Tokugawa into the fabric of Kyoto. Enshū’s authority over cultural production surrounding tea objects helped him mediate a celebration of Kyoto's past in a way that did not challenge modern Tokugawa hegemony.

Elizabeth Lillehoj examines Karasumaru Mitsuhiro (1579–1638) as a figure who helped Kyoto retain its cultural supremacy even as Edo gained political relevance, while some of its traditions were also absorbed in Edo. Mitsuhiro was a member of the court nobility who had close ties to the Tokugawa shoguns as well. He traveled from Kyoto to Edo eleven times, beginning in his twenties, forming a cultural bridge between the cities. His activities indicate the usefulness of Kyoto culture to the Tokugawa's effort to establish political legitimacy.

Patrick Schwemmer turns from a focus on specific figures who participated in early Edo art and politics to the study of an individual work of art, the Princeton Sagamigawa picture scrolls (ca. 1660–80). Sagamigawa tells one version of Minamoto Yoritomo and Minamoto Yoshitsune's relationship during the Genpei War. Schwemmer argues that this version of Yoshitsune's story presented an anti-authoritarian challenge to Tokugawa rule but was able to circulate because it did so in manuscript form rather than as a printed text. It expressed the repression some Kyoto residents felt under the new regime, but by containing the subversive content within a handscroll it could escape Tokugawa censorship.

The second half of the volume addresses the early Meiji period and opens with Tseng's contribution. She looks at parks created on emptied imperial and court lands after the imperial court moved to Tokyo. Creating cultural spaces and attractions was part of an effort in Kyoto to reclaim cultural authority after the emperor's move to Tokyo. The former imperial palace and garden became the site of the Kyoto Exhibitions, in which its association with the imperial family was part of the attraction at the site. Okazaki Park was instituted in the east of the city after the Heian Shrine and buildings for the Fourth National Industrial Exposition were constructed on land that had held temples and retirement palaces during the Heian period. Both of these sites relied on imperial memory to establish their authority while they were also part of creating the modern urban fabric of Kyoto.

Yasuko Tsuchikane examines the movement to preserve temples and their art as part of Kyoto's cultural revitalization project in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She focuses on the work of Kyoto's mayor Naiki Jinzaburō (1848–1926; in office 1898–1904). She demonstrates that patronage of new works of art within renovated temples provided significant support for Kyoto artists and for maintaining the cultural vitality of the temples during the early Meiji period, when Shinto and Buddhism were officially separated. Naiki was a central figure in Kyoto for supporting art in temples as a means to promote the cultural heritage of the city.

Julia Sapin considers the role of Edo-period shasei naturalism as practiced by painters such as Maruyama Ōkyo for creating a Kyoto-based Edo-period modernism that could be used during the Meiji period to promote Kyoto's position in the modern art world. Kyoto textile producers exploited this idea as well to produce works that appealed to the new market for Japanese art abroad. Kyoto's association with modernism, even as it celebrated the imperial past through the recognition of imperial patronage for textiles, helped it to negotiate artistic relevance in the changing Meiji world.

The volume ends with a coda from Toshio Watanabe about Japanese gardens in Kyoto. After reviewing how gardens developed in the Edo and Meiji periods, he explores the shifting understanding of the famous gardens at Ryōanji and the Katsura Detached Palace during the early twentieth century. Both gardens gained their reputations as supreme examples of Japanese garden design only in the twentieth century. He argues that Anglophone and Japanese writings about these gardens promoting them as examples of modernism led to their fame. (Ryōanji was also helped by a scene in Ozu Yasujirō’s Banshun [1949].) The new appreciation of these gardens was part of a broad shift away from a Tokyo-dominated understanding of Japanese gardens common in the late nineteenth century to one in which Kyoto took more prominence.

As a whole, Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods demonstrates that what Kyoto may have lost in political power during both the Edo and the Meiji periods was balanced by growing cultural power. In both periods, the artistic authority of the imperial court functioned as a legitimizing factor for Kyoto as it overcame its weakened political position. Its status as the ancient imperial capital was vital to its significance for the art world. Another study comparing the social authority of the imperial court in the Kyoto art world of the late Edo period to that in the early Meiji period would be helpful to understand how much the Restoration changed perceptions of the imperial court within the world of artistic patronage and production.

Lippit's edited volume contains the symposium proceedings from a fascinating gathering held in Washington, DC, in April 2012 on the occasion of the US exhibition of Itō Jakuchū’s Colorful Realm of Living Beings paintings in the Museum of the Imperial Collections, organized by Lippit at the National Gallery of Art. This landmark exhibition brought the paintings to the United States for the first time, and the accompanying symposium gathered an international group of scholars together to share ideas about artists and artistic production. It should be noted that the “Edo” of the volume's title is not the city of Edo, but rather the Edo period. This is not an Edo/Tokyo-centric book; Ogata Kōrin and the Kōrin-Sotatsu school, which began in Kyoto, are heavily represented within the essays, for example. Itō Jakuchū himself was an artist of Kyoto, not Edo. The twelve essays include ten that were given at the symposium (papers by symposium presenters Melissa McCormick, Francois Lachaud, and Hans Bjarne Thomsen are not included) and two additional essays that were not part of the original symposium (by Julie Nelson Davis and Lippit), which are welcome additions to the group. Credit should also be given to Kit Brooks, Frank Feltens, Lippit, and Yurika Wakamatsu for their fluid translations of works by the Japanese scholars in the volume.

The text has a broadly chronological organization, beginning with Louisa Allison Cort's essay on ceramics and ending with Timothy Clark's essay on the 1855 Jakuchū Memorial Exhibition. Painting is heavily represented. Only three essays primarily concern print artists, and even those reflect on painting as well. For example, Kishi Fumikazu considers the painting production of the well-known print artist Katsushika Hokusai, and Davis explores the transfer of painting to printed form. Several thematic groupings are also present. Some authors offer case studies of a limited number of works, while other projects have a broader scope. Clusters of subjects align within the book's organization. Three essays address the Sōtatsu-Kōrin school, and a further three discuss ukiyo-e. Two explore late Edo-period artists in Kyoto, and the final two focus on the nineteenth century. The text begins with Cort comparing professional and amateur ceramics artists and Lippit discussing official painters to the government, which serves as a good foundation for issues raised by many other authors.

Cort's contribution examines two extremes of pottery production—polished works by professional potters intended for use at banquets and naturally expressive forms by amateurs such as Hon'ami Kōetsu for use in tea ceremony. These two extremes are intended as a lens through which to see the diversity of Edo ceramic production and the artists who made these wares. Cort also discusses the consequences China's and Korea's influence in Japan's domestic ceramic production.

Lippit explores the role of painters-in-attendance to the shoguns. He covers the entirety of the Edo period, from Kano Tan'yū’s paintings in the audience hall at Nijō Castle in Kyoto to Kano Seisen'in Osanobu's designs for the nineteenth-century rebuilding of Edo Castle. Seisen'in's diary allows Lippit to access the first-person account of a painter immersed in the Edo world of the shogun. Lippit concludes that the Kano school system and the painters in attendance formed the basis for the training of modern artists during the Meiji period.

Tamamushi Satoko delves deeply into the early seventeenth-century Lotus Scroll painted by Tawaraya Sōtatsu with calligraphy by Hon'ami Kōetsu, arguing that it represents the high point of their partnership. Using other works by the same artists as comparisons, she demonstrates that the innovative spatial compositions used in Lotus Scroll and other handscrolls influenced large-format paintings, such as screens.

Emura Tomoko's focus is Ogata Kōrin, whose style was inspired by Sōtatsu's. Using classicism and patronage as a lens, she argues that Kōrin's art marks a shift in Edo painting production and warrants reevaluation in this light. Kōrin's patrons included both the imperial court in Kyoto and wealthy merchants in Edo, making him a figure who transcended many of the supposed divides in Edo-period society.

Kōno Motoaki continues the volume's close look at the Sōtatsu-Kōrin school by examining Kōrin's engagement with Noh theater. He demonstrates the extensive documentation of Noh in both Kōrin's papers and those of his important patrons the Nijō family. This, in turn, impacted Kōrin's selection of subject matter and the design of his compositions. This chapter is helpful for Anglophone readers as an expansion of material previously published only in Japanese.

With Timon Screech's essay, the volume turns from the largely Kyoto-centric focus of the beginning to the city of Edo. Screech's essay is an edited transcript of his talk at the 2012 symposium and retains the tone of an oral presentation. Beginning with an early seventeenth-century screen depicting amusements at the Shijô riverbed in Kyoto, he explores ways ukiyo-e artists depicted life in the city and the mingling of classes in theaters, public transportation, and tea houses, as well as when seeking refuge from a rainstorm. He argues that ukiyo-e artists were doing more than making pleasant pictures; they were challenging the social world in which they lived.

Kishi continues the theme of ukiyo-e artists through an examination of the ga/zoku (elegant/vulgar) binary in the genre. Beginning and ending with a discussion of Katsushika Hokusai, his essay concerns the place of ukiyo-e artists within Edo society compared to other artists and Hokusai's often quoted last words, “Should heaven grant me an extension of five more years, I surely would become a true painter” (Lippit, p. 129). Kishi explores the societal possibilities for artists in Edo and concludes that Hokusai made a conscious shift from the realm of ukiyo-e zoku to the ga of painting.

Davis also interrogates the relationship between painting and prints in her in-depth study of a surimono from circa 1786 by Toriyama Sekien and his students, especially Kitagawa Utamaro. She explores Sekien's position as a painter who reproduced works in print and, through printed books, the transfer of his prestige as an artist to Utamaro. This essay complements her chapter on surimono in her book Partners in Print.Footnote ²

The last four chapters of the book bring a return to Kyoto as the center of reflection with Satō Yasuhiro's study of Itō Jakuchū. Satō proposes that the stress of the economic market in Kyoto created anxiety among its citizens, which can be seen in Jakuchū’s paintings. The increase in urbanization created an amplified interest in paintings of nature, at which Jakuchū excelled. His Colorful Realm paintings represent his escape from the market into painting, and that element of escapism is also why they appealed to viewers at the time.

Matthew McKelway examines Nagasawa Rosetsu's Landscapes with Chinese Figures (c. 1794–99) to analyze Rosetsu's simultaneous use of landscape and abstraction. McKelway analyzes many screen paintings by Rosetsu to offer a nuanced reading about how the subject and the materiality of the painting resources came together to form Rosetsu's so-called eccentric style. McKelway argues for Rosetsu as an expressive painter who incorporated performance into his style.

Foxwell's penultimate essay focuses on copy books as a means to stimulate creativity in late-Edo artists, suggesting that their individuality could have been articulated through copying rather than suppressed by it. When artistic expectations suddenly changed in the Meiji period, artists trained in late Edo-period copying found themselves quickly outdated. Her case studies from both the Edo and Meiji periods argue that originality can be found in copying as well and that late-Edo artists foreshadow modern approaches to art.

The volume ends in 1885 with Clark's study of the Jakuchū Memorial Exhibition held that year. In addition to exploring numerous topics related to nineteenth-century exhibitions and collecting, Clark also relates his 1996 visit to Sa'ami, the last remaining restaurant in Higashiyama Kyoto that held single-day exhibitions like Jakuchū’s during the late nineteenth century. Fortuitously, he visited immediately before a renovation, and he was able to document the nineteenth-century appearance of the building in photographs. His essay ties together a network of nineteenth-century interest in Jakuchū and personal connections in Kyoto that persisted as late as 1885.

The Artist in Edo does not represent the full range of imagery produced during the Edo period, but offers many significant points of departure to think more carefully about what it meant to be an artist during the Edo period and ways art historians can approach these questions. The robust representation of both Anglophone and Japanese scholars is a strength of the book. It allows us to read in one place active scholarship occurring across national divides.

Issues of patronage play a prominent role throughout all of three of these books. In many of the essays in Lippit's volume, patrons are shown exerting great influence over how and why works of art were created. For example, Cort makes clear the impact of patrons’ and customers’ taste in motivating ceramicists’ work. All the essays on Kōrin address the Nijō family as central patrons of the artist. Within Davis's discussion of printmaking, private commissions are central to the genre of surimono. In her own book, Foxwell carefully addresses Hōgai's relationship with his samurai class patrons early in his career and with Fenollosa later in his career. These structures of patronage were foundational for the development of Nihonga. In Kyoto, as represented within Pitelka and Tseng's volume, the specters of shogunal and imperial patronage surround many artistic projects; during the Meiji period the prefectural government emerged as another important patron (especially in Tseng's and Tsuchikane's essays).

Along with patronage, these works demonstrate the relevance of art to politics. These themes are exceptionally clear in Pitelka and Tseng's volume, where artistic activities in Kyoto are undertaken as a direct response to the political situation. Koburi Enshū (Pitelka) and Karasumaru Mitsuhiro (Lillehoj) engaged in politics from the position of artists and patrons, while in the Meiji era Naiki Jinzaburō (Tsuchikane) was a politician who deployed the arts. Artistic production and its associated social capital were essential tools for Kyoto to use in positioning itself within new political orders. Foxwell's book addresses the nationalism of Nihonga as well. With its emphasis on the “Japaneseness” of works of art produced by Japanese artists in Japan, the “soft nationalism” of Nihonga was performed for both Japanese and Western artistic audiences.

The relationship of art to nostalgia hangs over most of the studies in these three volumes. Kyoto, of course, was nostalgic for days of greater power. Schwemmer demonstrates a nostalgia in Kyoto for a time before the power of the shogun; Sapin shows how nostalgia sells modern artistic production. In Tseng's study, nostalgia for the imperial past is embedded into the creation of modern Kyoto. Foxwell finds Edo-period nostalgia as well as Edo-period modernism in Nihonga. Essays in Lippit's volume address this idea as well. The classicism of Kōrin is a nostalgia for not only the Heian past but also the more recent past of Sōtatsu (Emura). Satō’s argument about Jakuchū’s nature paintings as a reaction against the urban market climate suggests a nostalgia for a simpler time. As times change, artists look to the past for inspiration.

These volumes represent a great diversity in ways to approach early modern and modern Japanese art. In particular, Pitelka and Tseng's volume and Foxwell's project encourage art historians to think across the Edo/Meiji divide for commonalities in the way art was produced and received, even as differences abound. Despite its later publication date, Lippit's book provides a useful context for the two earlier studies by helping to ground them in diverse approaches to artists and art making in the Edo period. All three volumes make a great contribution to increasing our understanding of these art historical periods.