Nihonga

Nihonga (Japanese: 日本画) is a Japanese style of painting that uses mineral pigments, and occasionally ink, together with other organic pigments on silk or paper. The term was coined during the Meiji period (1868–1912) to differentiate it from its counterpart, known as Yōga (洋画) or Western-style painting. The term literally translates to "pictures of Japan."^[1]

Nihonga began when Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenollosa sought to revive traditional Japanese painting in response to the rise of a new Western painting style, Yōga. Hashimoto Gahō, a painter of the Kano School, was the founder of the practical side of this revival movement. He did not simply paint Japanese-style paintings using traditional techniques, but revolutionized traditional Japanese painting by incorporating the perspective of Yōga and set the direction for the later Nihonga movement. As the first professor at the Tokyo Fine Arts School (now Tokyo University of the Arts), he trained many painters who would later be considered Nihonga masters, including Yokoyama Taikan, Shimomura Kanzan, Hishida Shunsō, and Kawai Gyokudō.^[2][3]

The term was already in use in the 1880s and a discussion of the context at the end of the Edo period is traced in Foxwell's monograph on Making Modern: Japanese-style Painting.^[4] Prior to then, from the early modern period on, paintings were classified by school: the Kanō school, the Maruyama-Shijō school, and the Tosa school of the yamato-e genre, for example. ^[5]