Oiran (Courtesan)

A stately, high-class courtesan gracefully gathers her kimono and steps forward, preparing to lead her attendants on a promenade through the busy streets of the Yoshiwara. The colors of her costume are different but the allusion to the beauties of the Edo period Kaigetsudo school remains.

Yamamura Kōka pursued a colorful and varied career in art. He worked as a stage-set designer, sometimes as an appraiser, and was known as a collector and connoisseur of ukiyo-e, dolls, ceramics and lacquerware; he traveled to China and was interested in Western painters such as Matisse, Corot, Millet and Rousseau. Influenced by the traditional ukiyo-e paintings of beauties (bijinga), he modernized them with a new, simplified color palette that reflected his contact with Western art.

Kōka’s first recognition as an artist came at the early age of fifteen in 1900, when he won third place for his painting Tabi no Ume (Plum Blossoms on the Road) at the 9^th Joint Painting Exhibition of the Japan Painting Society and the Japan Art Society. After first studying under Ogata Gekkō (1889-1920) he entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko) and from the time of his graduation in 1907, when he exhibited in the first Bunten Exhibition (of which Gekkō was a founding member) and won an award, his paintings were well received in concurrent art circles. He continued to exhibit in the Bunten exhibitions of 1910 and 1913-15, winning a prize in 1910 for his painting, Dai Kyujin. He joined the Ugokai (Flocking Birds Society), a group of artists who attempted to create new paintings of customs and fashions incorporating ukiyo-e traditions and also took part in exhibitions of the Bijutsu Kenseikai (Art Cultivation Society) and Sangokai (Coral society),

In 1916 he joined the Shinhanga Undo (New Print movement) together with Ito Shinsui and others and became a member of Nihon Bijutsu Inten and exhibited that year in the third Inten. Thereafter he exhibited mainly at the Inten shows, his major works being Hassaku, 1917, Choyo, 1918, Saigyo Senshusho, 1920, Konan Nanashu, 1921, Rakuyo-kyo, 1923, Fujin Aikin, 1925, Gondarimyoo, 1926 and Yokyoku Genso: Sumidagawa, Tamura, 1930. Following in his teacher’s footsteps (Gekkō had been an illustrator during the first Sino-Japanese War, 1894-1895) Kōka traveled to China. (His first trip might have been in connection with the Hochi Shinbunsha that he joined in 1907). Many of his works created for the Inten exhibits incorporate the impressions he reported at that time. 

After meeting the print publisher Watanabe Shozaburo in the 1920s, Koka did a series of actor prints, as well as bird and flower images and also lithographs under the name of Toyonari. Some were exhibited at the Toledo Museum in 1930. During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, Kōka accompanied the army to China and later two of his paintings produced as a result of that trip, Nanshi Suwato Joku Yori (The Sky over Suwato in Southern China) and Nanshi Komondojicho (Birds at the Tiger Gate in Southern China) were presented to the Imperial family from the Ministry of the Army.

Paintings and prints by Kōka are in the collections of the Riccar Art Museum, the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Honolulu Museum of Art, among others.

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