page_title: Kanae Yamamoto (artist)
section_title: Early life and training (1882–1907)
hierarchical_section_title: Kanae Yamamoto (artist) / Life and career / Early life and training (1882–1907)
caption_attribution_description: English: Kannon Riding a Dragon by Harada Naojiro, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 日本語: 騎竜観音〈原田直次郎筆 一八九〇年／油絵 麻布〉
context_page_description: Kanae Yamamoto was a Japanese artist, known primarily for his prints and yōga Western-style paintings. He is credited with originating the sōsaku-hanga movement, which aimed at self-expressive printmaking, in contrast to the commercial studio systems of ukiyo-e and shin-hanga. He initiated movements in folk arts and children's art education that continue to be influential in Japan.
  Kanae trained as a wood engraver in the Western style before studying Western-style painting. While at art school he executed a two-colour print of a fisherman he had sketched on a trip to Chiba. Its publication ignited an interest in the expressive potential of prints that developed into the sōsaku-hanga movement. Kanae spent 1912 to 1916 in Europe and brought ideas back to Japan gleaned from exhibitions of peasant crafts and children's art in Russia. In the late 1910s he founded movements the promotion of creative peasant crafts and in children's art education; the latter quickly gained adherents but was suppressed under Japan's growing militarism. These ideas experienced a revival after World War II.
context_section_description: Kanae Yamamoto descended from the Irie clan of hatamoto—samurai in the direct service of the Tokugawa shogunate of feudal Japan in Edo (modern Tokyo). His grandfather died 1868 in the Battle of Ueno, during the Boshin War which led to the fall of the Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration which returned power to the Emperor. This orphaned Kanae's father Ichirō, and thereafter he grew up in Okazaki in Aichi Prefecture; how he got there is a matter of speculation. The specialist in Chinese medicine, Ryōsai Yamamoto, from line of specialists in traditional Chinese medicine, took in Ichirō with the intention of raising him to marry his daughter Take, the eldest of the family's nine children.
  Kanae was born 24 October 1882 in the Tenma-dōri 1-chōme neighbourhood of Okazaki. Ryōsai intended Ichirō to continue the family profession, but when the Meiji government announced it would grant medical licenses only to those who practised Western medicine, Ichirō moved to Tokyo to study it shortly after Kanae's birth. He lodged in the household of Mori Ōgai's father, where he performed household duties to earn his keep. To advance his studies he took part the clandestine digging up of fresh graves to find bodies for dissection.
  When he was five, Kanae and his mother joined Ichirō in Tokyo and settled in a tenement house in the San'ya area. His mother did sewing work to help support the family, and with her sister Tama provided maid service to the Mori household, and thus Kanae often met his younger cousin, Murayama Kaita, who, like Kanae, was to make a career in art. The painter Harada Naojirō, whom Ōgai had befriended when the two were studying in Germany, asked Kanae's mother, whom he had seen at the Mori household, to model for the painting Kannon Bodhisattva Riding the Dragon of 1890. Such occurrences may have contributed to attracting Kanae to art.
  Ichirō raised his son under the influence of the liberal educational principles of Nakae Chōmin. Ichirō was responsible for the welfare of five of his wife's siblings, and so at age 11, after four years of primary school, the family finances did not permit Kanae's schooling to continue. He became an apprentice wood engraver and mastered Western techniques of tonal gradation in the workshop of Sakurai Torakichi in Shiba. His training focused on book and newspaper illustration, and included letterpress printing and photoengraving. His skill developed quickly and soon won praise from those he worked with. During this time printing technology underwent rapid change, brought to the forefront by the First Sino-Japanese War, which was reported in a variety of media, from paintings and woodblock prints to photographs. Kanae completed his apprenticeship at 18, followed by an obligatory year of service with Sakurai. By 1896, Ichirō had earned his medical license and set up a practice in Kangawa (now part of Ueda), a village in Nagano Prefecture.
  The rapid change in printing technology led Kanae to doubt his future prospects in wood engraving. He aspired to become a painter but knew his yet-indebted father was not in a position to pay for art school. He secretly enrolled at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1902, where he studied yōga Western-style painting. His instructors there included Masaki Naohiko, Iwamura Tōru , and Kuroda Seiki.
  To pay for school, Kanae worked odd printing jobs for employers such as the Hochi Shimbun newspaper, and from February 1903 lodged at the home of his friend Ishii Hakutei, the eldest son of the artist Ishii Teiko. Kanae and the other aspiring artists lodged there talked into the night about art and hired a model for life drawing once a month.
caption: Kanae's mother modelled for Kannon Bodhisattva Riding the Dragon.
   Harada Naojirō, oil on canvas, 1890
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "1536", "Image ImageLength": "2344", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2014:12:18 13:45:36", "Image ExifOffset": "236", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "386", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3441", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1342", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2048"}