By far and away, the most famous piece of art from Japan is The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, which depicts a vibrantly blue and many tentacled wave crashing down on three small boats in serious trouble while Mount Fuji squats serenely in the background. If you haven’t seen it on a museum wall, then you probably have seen it on a t-shirt, a jigsaw puzzle, a coffee mug, or graffiti. It even has its own emoji, and if that isn’t success in today’s world then I don’t know what is. One article (admittedly, only one) even claims it as the most reproduced piece of art in world history (Wood). Quite a statement when you are competing against the Mona Lisa, the Scream, and Starry Night.

I would love to tell you The Great Wave was done by a female artist. Sadly, that would not be true. The artist was Hokusai, who made that woodblock print in 1831 in the traditional style of ukiyo-e. Ukiyo-e originally depicted the idyllic life of leisure and beauty in the upper-class pleasure districts, but gradually expanded to include far more. Including a great wave, obviously.

I mention it as the shining example of Japan’s very strong art culture that predated the 1853 arrival of an American fleet into Tokyo Bay and said trade with us or fight with us, which will it be? Japan opted for trade. But actually the earlier Japan clearly wasn’t as closed to the West as some accounts led me believe. That vibrant blue in The Great Wave? Yeah, it’s Prussian blue, a synthetic compound invented in Europe. And The Great Wave was done a couple decades before Japan opened up. So there may have been a few cracks already, but after 1853 there was an embrace of all-things-Western, swiftly followed by a minor backlash saying hey, what about all-things-Japanese? And today’s artist is part of that backlash.

Uemura Tsune was born on April 23, 1875. As per usual with Asian names, Uemura is her family name. Tsune was her given name. Shōen was an artistic name she adopted later, but I’ll be using it throughout because switching names midstream is just confusing.

Her father died two months before she was even born. Her mother Nakako ran a tea leaf shop and never remarried. So unlike the majority of the women I’ve covered in this series, Shōen did not learn art from her professional artist father or stepfather, and she did not have the advantage of an arts education at home. But she drew a lot, sitting in the corners of her mother’s shop (Yamada, 12).

Her mother saw her talent and at age 12 enrolled her in an art school, a highly unusual step. Most families were just teaching their girls to sew. The art school she chose was one devoted to traditional styles like ukiyo-e. Her bent toward conservative Japanese styles was further strengthened when the school tried to open up and include crafts, not just high art. Sounds like a good idea to me, only Shōen’s teacher (Suzuki Shonen) didn’t think so, so he resigned in protest, and Shōen followed him for private lessons (Yamada, 12).

By 1890, Shōen was all of 15 years old, and she entered a painting into a national competition. The work she chose was called Beauties in the Four Seasons and it was right in line with a traditional subgenre of ukiyo-e called bijin-ga or beautiful women. In the traditional Japanese style, they are highly idealized with only lightly defined, very similar looking faces, but beautiful clothes and hairstyles.

As you know, beautiful women have always been a popular art subject the world over, but Shōen’s painting is interesting because it shows four beautiful women associated with spring, summer, fall, and winter, but also at different seasons of their own lives, young to old. Okay, maybe not all the way to old, but oldish. Admittedly, I might not have picked up on any that, but to a contemporary viewer the age progression would have been obvious by kimonos and hairstyles (Kaoru, 53).

This painting launched Shōen’s career as a bijin-ga painter. Not only did she receive a first commendation by the national judges, but the picture was purchased by a visiting foreign admirer: Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, seventh child of Queen Victoria. Japanese art at this time was making a splash in Europe, especially among Impressionist painters like Mary Cassatt.

Shōen’s international reputation was thus established and would continue a few years later when the Japanese government commissioned her to do another version of the same painting for the 1893 Worlds’ Columbian Exchange in Chicago, the very first of the world’s fairs held there.

Shōen’s work was displayed in the women’s building, which initially Japan had refused to participate in. Then they got worried about being lumped in with the uncivilized nations, and that would never do, so Japanese women got to participate after all. The main Japanese display in the Phoenix Hall was reserved for male artists (Kaoru, 54), but at least we are civilized, right? Of course we are.

Despite the fact that it launched her career, Shōen was later pretty embarrassed by this painting. Years later, she said “When I think about it today, it’s that I was very young, almost a girl. Since I had no models, I would go to the dressing table and reproduce postures as silhouettes or poses that I would then sketch. In this way I was able to complete my first work Beauties in the Four Seasons. Thinking about where the idea for the theme came from, well, the truth is that I don’t think it had a special meaning… It’s nothing more than a painting with totally childish ideas” (quoted in Galen, 100).

Childish or not, the public lapped it up.

By 1900, Shōen was not only doing well in national competitions, she was actually out placing her former teacher Mr. Suzuki (Yamada, 12). But on a more personal level, things were getting complicated. In 1902, Shōen, still single, gave birth to a son she named Nobutaro.

Naturally, everyone’s first question is who is the father? Swiftly followed by how does he intend to support his new family? But the answers were not forthcoming. Not until Nobutaro was 14 years old, did his father acknowledge him and that father was none other than Suzuki Shonen, her former teacher, 23 years old than her, and married with his own legitimate children.

My sources do not give any further information about what was going on there, but clearly it wasn’t ideal. That reticence is not just on the part of my sources. Shōen herself was reticent, even in her memoirs, she guarded her privacy about her relationship with Suzuki, so we can only speculate. None of my speculations are particularly joyful. Or romantic for that matter.

Fortunately, Shōen had other resources: she had a thriving painting career and she also had her own mother, an expert in single parenthood. In 1903, the tea leaf shop was closed, and they moved to Kyoto, where Shōen could take in students and sell her paintings, while her mother cared for the baby and the house. Moms are truly great.

Shōen had her studio on the second floor of their house, and her son later said that he called her Mother Upstairs. He clearly had a more traditional mother-son relationship with his grandmother, but that didn’t mean he was on bad terms with Shōen. He said “I felt she was different from my friend’s mothers. Even as a child, however, I noticed that my mother enjoyed great respect of the public, and I was proud of her” (quoted in Yamada, 13).

Shōen continued to paint her beautiful women. Bijin-ga had begun with women as courtesans in the pleasure districts of Kyoto, but it had expanded by this point to include women of wealth and high status, not necessarily courtesans. Her subjects were often taken from noh dramas, the traditional Japanese masked theater, so she was tapping into cultural references that were clear to her audience but maybe not to us. In much the same way that Western painters were doing Bible and mythological scenes. What she didn’t paint was poor women who had no time or money to devote to hair or clothing. This was a pursuit of beauty that did not attempt to find beauty in the ugliness of hard reality.

But that did not mean that her women experienced no pain. In 1918, Shōen completed the Apparition of Flame, which was a reference to a character in the Tale of Genji by another fabulous Japanese woman: Murasaki Shikibu (episode 6.2). The Apparition of Flame is unusual for Shōen in that the woman in the painting is tearful and her hair is just ever so slightly unkempt.

Shōen surprised even herself in this. She wrote “Later I wondered myself why I had painted such a horrifying image. I was experiencing a severe slump in my art at the time. I think I transmitted my frustration into that particular subject and directed all my feeling to it” (quoted in Fister, 16).

She also hinted that the severe slump was not just about art. She said it was done in “the flame of a middle-aged woman’s jealousy” (Yamada, 13). Some historians like to speculate what she meant by that and connect it with the fact that Suzuki Shonen had just died. I hope it’s entirely unrelated myself. It had been sixteen years since their son was born. Please tell me she had moved on. But maybe not.

By this point in her career, fashion was beginning to pass Shōen by. Some people were beginning to question whether paintings of dolled up courtesans who existed solely to give pleasure to men was really something they wanted to celebrate. Idealized beauty, in this view, was really just a lie and a degrading lie at that. They made some valid points.

However, in Shōen’s bijin-ga there’s nothing overtly erotic about the women. Shōen’s women are all, for example, fully clothed, which certainly cannot be said about the art that had been celebrated in the West for centuries now. In fact, analysis shows Shōen’s women are significantly more modestly dressed than in similar works by contemporary male Japanese painters (Morioka, 147-148)

It’s also worth taking a look at what Shōen herself said about her painting. She was not pursuing beauty for the sake of pleasing men, but for its own sake. One of her comments even has somewhat religious overtones:

My heart’s desire for my painting is that it contains not a speck of coarseness and has a clear atmosphere like a gem… My heart’s desire is that when you see my painting, you will have no evil thought. Even if a person has a wicked heart, the painting will clear his mind… I like to paint bijin-ga that reach the zenith of truth, virtue, and beauty… I want to show the idealism and devotion inherent in the beauty of women.

–quoted in Yamada, 14

I don’t see anything sexualized in that. In some of her comments, you can even find some nascent feminism. Yes, she painted courtesans (among others), but that did not make these women inherently worthless. She said, “Even when depicting a geisha, I want to represent a woman with a will of her own, and a sense of pride, rather than simply pretty and bewitching” (quoted in Fister, 4).

She was even more clear about that what she considered her best work. She painted it in 1936 and it is called Noh Dance Prelude. A woman in a red kimono stands tall, holding out her fan.

Shōen said what pleased her about this painting was that it featured a strong woman, with a feminine gaze, who “could not be violated by anyone or anything. I wanted to represent in this painting the strong determination hidden inside women. I think somehow I was able to show my sincere feelings about classical elegance” (quoted in Galen, 102).

So you just have to wonder about that not being violated comment and wonder if it had anything to do with her murky past history with Suzuki. But also, there’s an angle that none of my sources explored, which is that this painting of a female noh dancer was done in 1936. Technically speaking, women weren’t allowed in noh theater until 1948. Just like in the West, women’s roles were played by men or boys before that. Now it is true that some women had studied and performed on an amateur basis (Whatley), but Shōen’s depiction of strong female determination showed a woman doing something she actually could not yet do as an equal professional. I think there’s room to interpret that as a subtle but insistent manifesto, if you really want to.

Feminism aside, there were other ways that things were changing. She continued to attend the yearly national exhibitions in Tokyo, but she no longer found them to her taste. New paintings were gaudy, and so were the painters. They didn’t seem to celebrate the beauty of Japanese heritage. “I have become old,” she said after the one in 1929, “and feel left out of the modern world. Nevertheless, I do not think that it is necessary to catch up” (quoted in Yamada, 14).

And she didn’t. She stuck to her own ideas of beauty, forgoing, for example, the idea of painting any woman with a newfangled perm. “I don’t care how extraordinary permed beauties are,” she said, “I can perceive some beauty in these hairstyles, but they will never be material for my bijin-ga… I don’t find even the slightest bit of Japanese beauty in them” (quoted in Galen, 101). And certainly it’s true that Japanese women are not famous for naturally curly hair.

My own personal favorite of her paintings is her tribute to her mother. Nakako had always stood by her and supported her, but she grew ill and Shōen nursed her for six years until she died in 1934. That same year she exhibited Mother and Child, and said “I am indebted to my mother not only because she gave birth to me but also my art” (Yamada, 14).

She also wrote an autobiography called Memoirs of the Blue Eyebrows, which as far as I can tell has not been translated into English. Spanish, yes, and that is where I got some of the quotes in this episode. But where, you may ask, do the blue eyebrows come in? I don’t know. I do know that Shōen considered the eyebrows to be the most expressive part of the face, more so than eyes and mouth. But why blue? If you know, get in touch. (I do note that in the picture above, the eyebrows are blue.)

Unfortunately, hard times were coming for the whole world, and Japan certainly played a role in that. In the 1940s, military themes were strongly encouraged. Not Shōen’s forte, but she nevertheless painted ordinary women at ordinary occupations for the first time in her career. She was in her sixties now.

She also moved from Kyoto to the countryside to escape the bomb threat. In the end, she needn’t have bothered. Kyoto was removed from the list of targets for the atomic bomb because it was a cultural heritage site. The people of Nagasaki suffered instead (Atomic Archive).

In 1948, Shōen was the first woman to receive the Order of Culture, which was Japan’s highest commendation for a living artist. She died a year later on August 27, 1949. She did not live long enough to see her son receive the same award for his own work. At the time one of my sources was written, they were the only two generational family to have received the honor.

Selected Sources

Atomic Archive. “The Rise of the Atomic Cloud | Nagasaki: A Guide to Peace | Historical Documents.” Www.atomicarchive.com, http://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/hiroshima-nagasaki/nagasaki/chapter4.html#:~:text=The%20Decision%20to%20Drop%20the%20Atomic%20Bomb&text=that%20its%20destruction%20by%20America.

Fister, Patricia. “FEMININE PERCEPTIONS IN JAPANESE ART OF THE KINSEI ERA.” Japan Review, no. 8 (1997): 3–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25790976.

Galán Sanz, A. (2023). Memories of Blue Eyebrows. The Writings of Painter Uemura Shōen. CLINA Revista Interdisciplinaria De Traducción Interpretación Y Comunicación Intercultural, 8(2), 87–105. https://doi.org/10.14201/clina20228287105

Kaoru, Kojima. “Pictures of Beautiful Women: A Modern Japanese Genre and Its Counterparts in Europe, China, Korea, and Vietnam.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 26 (2014): 50–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43945791.

Morioka, Michiyo. (1990). Changing Images of Women: Taishō-Period Paintings by Uemura Shōen (1875-1949), Itō Shōha (1877-1968) and Kajiwara Hisako (1896-1988). Doctoral Thesis doctoral. University of Washington. https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/6225.

Munsterberg, Hugo. “Tradition and Innovation in Modern Japanese Painting.” Art Journal 27, no. 2 (1967): 151–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/775110.

Whatley, Katherine. “Living and Breathing History, through Noh.” The Theatre Times, 24 Mar. 2018, thetheatretimes.com/living-breathing-history-noh/.

Wood, Patrick. “Is This the Most Reproduced Artwork in History?” ABC News, 20 July 2017, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-20/hokusai-the-wave:-is-this-the-most-reproduced-artwork/8720070.

Yamada, Nanako, and Helen Merritt. “Uemura Shõen: Her Paintings of Beautiful Women.” Woman’s Art Journal 13, no. 2 (1992): 12–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/1358147.