Byobu or folding screen in two panels, painted on paper in sumi ink, gofun or clam shell gesso and mineral pigments, with two young beauties flanking a potted orchid on a bonsai stand, one holding a small pet dog and the other a mister and bowl of water. Signed by the artist on the lower left side of the left panel: Harumi Saku or Painted By Harumi, and sealed: Harumi (Tateishi Harumi, 1908 – 1994). Showa 8 or 1933.

Titled Ran or Orchid, this painting was painted for exhibition at the 14th Teiten in 1933. It was acquired directly from the artist by the art patron and collector Hosokawa Rikizo. Along with the rest of his painting collection, it entered the Meguro Gajoen Museum Collection after the Pacific War, from which it was acquired by Kagedo in 2003. It is illustrated in the Nittenshi, volume 11, page 129, number 181 and in Tateishi Harumi Ten, page 23, number 5.

Tateishi Harumi was born in Saga Prefecture, where his artistic aptitude was discovered by the Western-style painter, Kajiwara Kango. In 1928, Harumi moved to Tokyo to pursue training as a painter. Apparently the smell of the Western oil paints did not appeal to him, and in the following year he began to study under the newly famous Nihonga painter Ito Shinsui (1898 – 1972). Shinsui would go on to become a Teiten examiner in 1933 and a major figure in the Japanese art world, and his star was rising rapidly at the time. Only 31 years old in the year Harumi became his student, Shinsui had just cemented his reputation as a master of bijinga (paintings of beautiful women) by capturing highest honors (tokusen) in the Teiten for the second year in a row. Shinsui was in fact central to the popularization of the term bijinga, which is said to have begun around 1915 following the establishment of a “bijinga room” at the Bunten. Shinsui’s bijinga were influenced by his own teacher Kaburaki Kiyokata (1868 – 1972), a distinguished painter of beautiful women who has been described as the “last artist of Edo Ukiyo-e,” and Tateishi Harumi may be seen as the inheritor of this artistic lineage. As the Director of the Meguro Gajoen Museum notes, however, Harumi’s perspective on feminine beauty differed from that of Kiyokata and Shinsui, who sought the glamour of the modern woman and feminine beauty as a symbol of beauty itself: “ Rather, it was in the precise investigation of the customs of the time that shaped women, in other words, the depiction of those things that come from within and set women beautifully aglow – such as youth, happiness at celebratory events, cheer at seasonal celebrations, and casual everyday actions – to which he devoted great attention.”

For other paintings by Tateishi Harumi, c.f. Kagedo’s catalogue Light Through Clouds, numbers 9, 11, 12, 15, 19 and 33. His work is in the collections of the Saga Prefectural Museum, the Tateishi Harumi Memorial Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

With Ran, Tateishi Harumi depicts traditional yet modern beauties. Dressed in elegant summer kimono, they attend a flowering orchid. The small western dog and bobbed hair of the younger woman are chic modern details. The orchid grows in a traditional bonsai pot atop a traditional stand, protected by a Western-style lace doily. Serious and elegant in her white and black ikat kimono, the older of the two displays a solemn demeanor as she mists the rare plant. Stylistically, the depiction of both the orchid and the stand reflects the influence of Western perspective and its concern with three dimensional depth, in contrast to the flatter depiction of the women on both sides, which reflects the influence of classical bijinga and Harumi’s teacher, Ito Shinsui.

Portraits of these two women reappear many times in Harumi’s work from this period. They are the subject of his first Teiten painting (also a two panel screen) in 1931 and of Clover, his 1934 Teiten piece (now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), as well as of Make-up, his 1937 Nihongakai exhibition work. The younger appears alone in Ume Kaoru, his Teiten entry in 1932 (number 83 in Kagedo’s catalogue Breaking Light) and in Shirozake, his Nihongakai exhibition entry in 1934.