Nakamura Tsune

Self-portrait 1922

Nakamura Tsune ( Japanese 中 村 彝 ; born July 3, 1887 ; died December 24, 1924 ) was a Japanese painter of the yoga direction.

Live and act

Self-portrait with skull

Nakamura was in Mito ( Ibaraki Prefecture ), the son of a samurai born. First he reported to the military and attended the army preparatory school in Nagoya . However, he had to give up this career for health reasons. He reoriented himself and from 1909 attended the school of the Hakubakai artists' association ( 白馬 会 ). The following year he moved to the training center of the Taiheiyō Gakai Kenkyūjo ( 太平洋 画 会 研究所 , English Pacific Art Society ) and studied oil painting under Nakamura Fusetsu (1866-1943) and Mitsutani Kunishirō (1874-1936).

In 1909 his oil painting "Felsen" ( 巌 , Iwao ) was mentioned in the third exhibition of the Ministry of Culture, called "Bunt" for short . In the following year his picture “Village by the Sea” ( 海 辺 の 村 , Umibe no mura ) received a third prize. So he was well on the way to recognition when his illness caught up with him again. Soma Aizō and his wife Kokkō, operators of the Shinjuku Nakamura-ya bakery, took care of Nakamura, and so he was able to exhibit again in 1914, again received a third prize and a second prize the following year.

His painting style now got an impressionistic note, influenced by Renoir , painted the "Portrait of Prof. Tanakadate" ( 田中 館 博士 の 肖像 , Tanakadate hakase no shōzō ) in 1916. Another well-known picture is the portrait of the blind Russian writer Jeroshenko from 1920 .

Despite fever and hemoptysis , he continued to work, following the European scene. The “self-portrait with skull” ( 髑髏 を 持 て る 自 画像 , Dokuro o moteru jigazō ) 1923/24 and “Portrait of the old mother” ( 老母 像 , Rōbozō ) are likely to have been his last works.

In connection with his Renoir studies, Nakamura translated the work “Le Livre de l'Art” into Japanese, which in turn was a translation by Victor Mottez (1809–1897) of the work of Cennino Cennini (1370–1440) and for Cézanne that Had written a preface. - Nakamura also left a number of poems and a collection of essays ( 芸 術 の 無限 感 , Geijutsu no mugen-kan ) on his view of painting.

Nakamura's studio has been preserved in its original form and is open to the public.

photos

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  "Rock", 1909

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  "Girls", 1912

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  "Girls", 1914

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  "Tanakadate", 1916

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  “Garden with a Bird Cage”, 1918

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  "Jeroshenko", 1920

Remarks

1. ↑ Tanakadate Aikitsu (1856–1952), was a famous geophysicist, holder of the Japanese cultural order and staunch advocate of the Nihonshiki transliteration of Japanese.
2. ↑ This picture received a third prize at the 8th Bunten exhibition in 1914.
3. ↑ This picture was shown at the exhibition Japanese Painting in Western Style 1985 in the Museum for East Asian Art in Cologne.

literature

• Suzuki, Toshihiko (Ed.): Nakamura Tsune . In: NIhon daihyakka zensho (Denshibukku-han), Shogakukan, 1996.
• Japan Foundation (Ed.): Japanese Painting in the Western Style, 19th and 20th Centuries. Exhibition catalog, Cologne, 1985.
• Tazawa, Yutaka: Nakamura Tsune . In: Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Art. Kodansha International, 1981. ISBN 0-87011-488-3 .

Web links

Commons : Nakamura Tsune  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Nakamura's studio as a museum

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Nakamura is the family name, Tsune the first name.