Kano Hogai (1828-1888)


Meiji era (1868-1912), 1880sKakejiku (vertical hanging scroll); ink and slight colours on paper in silk mounts, depicting a standing figure of Daruma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, with seals Ka, no, Tadamichi no in (seal of Tadamichi); with a wooden storage box. Overall: 263cm x 158cm (103½in x 62¼in); image: 224cm x 128cm (88¼in x 50 3/8in). (2).
|The son of a provincial member of the Kano academy, Hogai was trained in the Kano tradition in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and from 1860 played a role in the redecoration of Edo Castle. With the fall of the Tokugawa shoguns, principal patrons of the Kano painters, Hogai lost his livelihood and was reduced to ceramic and lacquer decoration but following his 'discovery' by two influential Bostonian scholars and collectors, Ernest Fenollosa and William Sturgis Bigelow, he worked to restore the status of traditional Japanese painting, producing works like the present outsize hanging scroll that combined East Asian brushwork with Western techniques of modelling and shading.