Terashima Shimei (1892-1975)
Shūjitsu (Autumn Day)
Signed: Shimei
Sealed: Shi
Framed: ink and color on paper
12 x 10 inches (30.5 x 25.5 cm); frame, 26 x 23 in. (66 x 58.5 cm)
The literary and art magazine Shirakaba (White Birches), founded by a group of Peers’ School graduates, published its first edition in 1910 and had reached the height of its popularity by 1918. It was devoted to promoting the absorption of Western culture through literary and art works and included articles that introduced the paintings of many French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists to a new Japanese audience. A few Japanese artists had begun to visit Europe and America, some attending the new international art fairs. Asia too was beckoning, with paintings of women from other Asian countries swelling in the nihonga ranks, even though most of the artists had never traveled there
It is quite likely that Shimei was a reader of Shirakaba, devoted as he was to literature and painting, and certainly his teacher Kitano Tsunetomi did incorporate facets of Western style painting in some of his works. Therefore, it is not surprising that Shimei should portray a bijin who appears to be a woman of undetermined middle-Eastern descent in this portrait simply titled Autumn Day.
Shimei was born in January of 1872 in Akashi, Hyōgo prefecture, to the owner of a wholesale cotton business. While still in elementary school, he showed interest in the arts studying Japanese literature, poetry, drawing, and calligraphy. Leaving the Kansai for Tokyo in 1913 at the age of twenty-one, he became a student of Kaburaki Kiyokata and began to study bijinga painting. He continued illustration work along with his painting and exhibited and won prizes intermittently with Teiten, Shin-Buntin, and Nitten. At the age of fifty-one, he became a judge of Nitten and later its councilor. He continued to paint powerful bijin figures in simple compositions and was awarded the Kobe Newspaper Peace Prize in 1971.
Paintings by Shimei are in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Yamatane Museum of Art, among others.
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