Asai Chū


Asai Chū was a Japanese painter, noted for his pioneering work in developing the yōga art movement in late 19th century and early twentieth-century Japanese painting.

Biography

Asai was born to an ex-samurai class household in Sakura, in the Kantō region of Japan, where his father had been a retainer of the Sakura Domain. He attended the domain school, where his father was principal, and left home in 1873 to pursue English language studies in Tokyo. However, he became interested in the arts, and enrolled as a pupil of Kunisawa Shinkuro in western oil painting classes. In 1876, he enrolled as one of the first students in the Kobubijutsu Gakkō, where he was able to study under the Italian foreign advisor Antonio Fontanesi, who had been hired by the Meiji government in the late 1870s to introduce western oil painting to Japan.
In 1889, he established the Meiji Bijutsukai, the first group of Western-style painters in Japan, and in 1898, he became a professor of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and founded the Kansai Bijutsu-in.
Asai taught numerous students who later became famous in the Japanese art world, including Sōtarō Yasui and Ryuzaburo Umehara. He also tutored the noted poet Masaoka Shiki in the techniques of western art, and was the model for a character in Natsume Sōseki's novel Sanshirō.
A number of Asai’s works have been recognized by the Japanese government's Agency for Cultural Affairs as Important Cultural Properties.

Noted works