Kuroda Seiki (Japanese painter) 1866 - 1924
Viscount Kuroda Seiki was the pseudonym of a Japanese painter and teacher, noted for bringing Western theories about art to a wide Japanese audience. He was among the leaders of the yōga (or Western-style) movement in late 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese painting. His real name was Kuroda Kiyoteru. In this Japanese name, the family name is "Kuroda". Kuroda Seiki was born into a family from the Satsuma domain that was given a peerage after the Meiji Restoration. At the age of 18 he was sent to France to study law. In Paris, however, he met the painter Yamamoto Hosui and the art dealer Hayashi Tadamasa and decided to become a painter instead. Raphaël Collin, who combined Academicism and Impressionism, became his teacher. While working with Collin, he produced his Reader and Morning Toilette, both of which were selected for the Salon. When Kuroda returned to Japan, his bright, cheerful paintings brought a breath of fresh air to Japan’s art establishment. Appointed to head the newly established Faculty of Western Painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, he became involved in using art education and exhibitions to transplant the European painting he had learned in Paris to Japan. As his use of preliminary sketches to bring concrete form to abstract ideas demonstrates, he believed that the artist should be creating imaginative paintings. He tried to provide examples through his large-scale Talk on Ancient Romance and Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment. The second half of his life, however, was largely taken up with administrative work in the arts and culture; those responsibilities reduced his own artistic production to mostly small works that present a miscellany from his daily life and landscape paintings.
