SHUKADO gallery

The rose, loved the world over as the queen of flowers. The flower that gave rise to any number of myths and stories has been enjoyed in Japan since the days of the Man’yoshu; it came into fashion among gardeners in the Edo period, and from the Meiji period was taken up quickly by the upper classes. From Meiji through Showa, even after it came to be loved by everyone, the rose has kept its throne as a flower apart. The rose: lustrous, honoured, unlike any other. See what love, and what challenge, painters have put into it.

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The roses he painted were ones the painter grew himself. The colour is beautifully judged and the tones sit together; the picture looks to have been made without effort, and yet the painter’s rare sense of things is plain in it. A work that opens an hour of happiness, as though you had gone back to being a child.

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Sunouchi Toru — dealer, critic, collector, and the author of popular books such as Kimagure Bijutsukan — wrote: “When I look at Shohei’s pictures of roses, I am being taught how to look at a rose. A good picture teaches you how to look at a thing properly.” (Sunouchi Toru, Ningyo o Mita Hito: Kimagure Bijutsukan, Shinchosha, 1985.)

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Roses drawn with a free and headlong touch, brilliant to the eye and full-blooded, are what Asai Kanemon is known by. He is said to have insisted on using only roses grown in the open ground as his subject.

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A painter who worked to spread English watercolour, went to Taiwan as a member of staff at the Taipei Normal School, and founded the Taiwan Watercolour Society. In Taiwan he is called the father of watercolour and the founder of modern Western-style painting there. A fresh piece that shows him at his best.

It was Sunouchi Toru, again, who found Rinjiro and his gift. From their first meeting Sunouchi thought highly of him and became the man who understood him best — though when he first saw a rose picture of Rinjiro’s buried in a junk shop in Kanda, he took it that the painter must be dead. That is how far Rinjiro kept out of public view: a solitary painter who made little. But more than that, he built an art so entirely his own, and so universal, that it overrode any notion of old or new — enough to hold Sunouchi’s eye fast.

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Sculpture stripped of any excess of effect, pressing close to the rose as it actually is. What beauty is lodged there?

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A splendid round tray in which the carving stands out. Roses treated with a refinement and a warmth that will settle into daily life.

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“Compared with a human being, a rose or a fruit seems to pass through decades in a few hours. I want to set down the changing colour, the changing shape, that passage of time.” — Tetsuya Mishima

To hold a moment of beauty for ever. It may be the beginning of painting, and its unchanging theme. Enjoy the beauty of Mishima’s work, built on sure technique and on study that never lets up.