After the Rain - A Mild Spring Day (Ugo - Haru-uraraka)

Tateishi Harumi (1908-1994)

After the Rain – A Mild Spring Day (Ugo – Haru-uraraka)

hanging scroll, ink, gofun, and color on silk; posthumously signed and sealed on the painting by Tateishi Hideharu (the artist’s son), Harumi, accompanied by wood storage box likewise titled, signed and sealed by Hideharu: titled on the lid: Ugo (After the Rain), and signed and sealed on lid verso: Meguro Gajoen Bijitsukan kyuzo (former collection of Meguro Gajoen Art Museum), Harumi ga (painted by Harumi), sealed Harumi, and signed Tateishi Hideharu kan dai, with seal Hideharu; with inventory label on the back of the scroll, shigatsu gogatsu (4th month, 5th month), dai ni-san-kyu go (no. 239), mumei hitsu (signed, unnamed), gadai (titled): Haru-uraraka (A Mild Spring Day), ca. 1935

An elegant beauty walks along a paved pathway beside a canal. She is prepared for rain, carrying a deep red Western-style red umbrella and her feet are elevated in red-tipped ama-geta (lit. ‘rain geta’, also known as takai-geta, or ‘high geta’) protecting her hem from dragging in puddles. Her hair is coiffed in a modern style with coquette hair rolls at her temple cascading into a single roll toward the nape of her neck. The pattern on her kimono is decorated with butterflies and moths, representative of night and day as well as male and female subjects. Two pairs of mandarin ducks, symbolic of love and fidelity, are paired off in the canal zig-zagging behind her. Her umbrella is closed, and the weather is clearing as sections of the canal’s retaining wall and distant pine trees emerge from the mist. Bare tree branches reaching into the upper left of the composition have not yet begun to bloom, confirming the season is early spring. The paved walkway and steep slopes planted with pines could be located along the retaining walls on the northside of the moat surrounding Tokyo’s Imperial Palace.

Although the artist’s son Tateishi Hideharu titled the painting After the Rain (Ugo) on the storage box lid, the inventory label (likely from the Meguro Gajoen Art Museum) affixed to the back of the scroll records a different title, A Mild Spring Day (Haru-uraraka) for the then unsigned painting, and indicates which months it would be suitable for display (April & May), suggesting it was likely once part of a set of six paintings representing two months each. The alternate title, Haru-uraraka, refers the season when winter changes to spring, the air becomes warmer, and trees begin to leaf out and bloom. It is a moment of transition and anticipation, reflected perhaps in the expression of this beauty, lost in thought amid a personal reverie.

Born Tateishi Haruyoshi in Saga Prefecture, Harumi began his artistic training in yoga (Western-style painting) with local artist Kajiwara Kango (1887-1958). In 1928 he moved to Tokyo intending to continue working in oil, but changed paths to study Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) the following year when he became a student of the 31-year-old rising star, Ito Shinsui (1898-1972). Harumi became a regular participant in the exhibitions organized by Shinsui and Kabaragi Kiyokata (1878-1972), and only two years later he won a prize at the 12th Teiten for a two-panel screen, one of many such awards achieved at government-sponsored exhibitions including Teiten, Shin-Bunten, Nitten, and Hoshukuten.

Harumi was a favorite artist of Hosokawa Rikizo (1889-1945), the owner of the Meguro Gajoen (Palace of Lyrical Elegance), an entertainment complex built in the aftermath of the 1923 earthquake which opened in 1931. Hosokawa was a major patron of Nihonga artists and acquired at least thirty of Harumi’s paintings for the extensive Meguro Gajoen Museum of Art collection, installing large-scale paintings in the galleries and private rooms and also rotating works among numerous niches. In 1993 a memorial museum for Harumi was established in Saga, his home-prefecture. Important works by Harumi are in the collections of The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who holds one of his most famous works, the two-panel screen, Clover (no. 2004.242).

Provenance:

Hosokawa Rikizo Collection; Meguro Gajoen Museum of Art

Patricia Salmon Collection

Published:

Hosono Masanobu et al., Kindaino bijinga: Meguro Gagoen Korekushon (Paintings of Japanese Beauties at the Turn of the Century), 1988, pl. 379

References:

Anne Nishimura Morse, Modern Girls in the Palace of Lyrical Elegance, in The Brittle Decade: Visualizing Japan in the 1930s, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2012, pp. 51-89

Julia Meech, et. al., Patricia Ann Salmon (1933-2002): Plenty of Charm and Taisho Chic, in, Impressions 44: The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America, 2023, pp. 125-153