Painting on paper in mineral pigments mounted as a framed panel, depicting hunters in the snow. Signed on the lower left with a seal form signature by the artist: Harumi (Tateishi Harumi, 1908 – 1994). Showa 14 or 1939.

Titled: Karyudo or Hunters, this painting was first exhibited at the 3rd Shin-Bunten in 1939, when 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 War, from which it was acquired by Kagedo in 2003. It is illustrated in the Nittenshi, volume 13, page 410, number 105, and in Tateishi Harumi Ten, page 38, number 26. This painting is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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 ended up beginning studies 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 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. But as the Director of the Meguro Gajoen Museum notes, 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.”

Harumi was an emerging talent at the time he became Shinsui’s student: in particular he astounded his new teacher and fellow students with his skills at sketching, a technique he first studied under the Western-style painter Kajiwara. He subsequently outshone many of Shinsui’s older students by entering his first Teiten piece in 1931, when he was just 23.

In 1929, the year that Harumi became his student, Shinsui presided over the first exhibition of the Roho Gajuku painting group, composed of students of Shinsui that specialized in portraiture. Three years later Tateishi Harumi would win the first Roho Prize in the third such exhibition, with his painting, Ume Kaoru. He continued to exhibit at the Teiten and Shin-Bunten until the War, and afterwards at the Nitten. He was awarded many prizes for his work, and came to be celebrated towards the end of his long life as “the last of the painters of beautiful women” (bijingaka). Harumi died at the age of 86, in Atami in Kanagawa Prefecture, on April 27, 1996.

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

Noted for his modernist portraits, Tateishi Harumi painted far fewer men than women. In fact few male portraits exist from this period. This painting of hunters derives from a sketch he made while hunting in the snowy mountains with fellow artists. The central figure is said to be his good friend, the artist Kawate Seikyo (1902 – 1966). Harumi depicts hunting in the contemporary and Western influenced style, not as a profession but as leisure. His portrait of his friend also shows the emerging influence of cinema on contemporary aesthetics. The figures seem posed heroically, larger than life, the image of male virtue. The style of painting is sharp and distinct. At the same time, as the contemporary critic Tomito Keiko noted in the November, 1939 edition of the art journal Toei, there is an underlying sense of humor (yumoa) in the depiction of the hunters, whose portraits he describes as “sure-handed (tegatai) and forthright (sunao).” (Commentary reprinted in the Nittenshi, volume 13, page 568). As viewers we feel Harumi’s humor and fondness for his subjects, the apparent energy and passion of the dashing central figure contrasting with the young beater shivering from the cold in traditional straw boots.