Musée No:218.019
Regular price £25.00Birds and Flowers
Artist: Watanabe Seitei
Date:1887
Watanabe Seitei (also Watanabe Shōtei) 1851-1918 was a Japanese painter in the Nihonga style. Nihonga was a movement in the early 1900s with the aim of updating and developing a more modern Japanese style but in keeping with the traditional Japanese conventions and techniques. It emphasized the importance and beauty of the thousand-year-old traditional style whilst distinguishing it from the more western style paintings. He became a major inspiration to the following generation of Nihonga artists. At the beginning of the 20th century international travel was very difficult for Japanese artists and no one is entirely sure how he managed it - one theory is that work he did for an export company in the 1870s may have provided him with the necessary contacts. In 1878 he was one of the first Japanese artists to travel to the States and Europe. He lived in Paris for three years to study the western style of painting and was awarded a medal at the 1878 International Exhibition in Paris. He combined the realism of western paintings with the exquisite colours and washes of the Kikuchi Yosai school, his teacher when he was 16. His work was very popular and is widely collected in the West.
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