“A man named Umehiko once owned a work titled
A Kitten Playing Behind the Bonsai
by Oei. Being impressed with the color, which was extremely delicate and magnificent, Umehiko asked her how she drew it. Her reply was ‘I did not intend to make it a miniature but somehow it turned out like that.’ Umehiko notes that Oei drew fine illustrations even on silk with lining, which is very hard to paint on.”
[11]
In a second article, Kubota questions Hokusai’s style and the dates of a certain painting. “Take, for example,
Te-odori zu
(“hand dancing”), which is said to be one of Hokusai’s
bijin-ga
. It is natural to suspect that this might be painted by Oei. If you look into Hokusai’s chronology, he was devoted to creating
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
toward the end of the 1830s. I wonder if he dared to paint this hand-dancing picture under this situation, which required him to articulate the shape of fingers and hand? Hokusai was not very good at drawing hands and fingers accurately. So his signature placed on this work is in doubt. On top of that,
Touto
(“east of Edo”) was added to the signature. This could mean that the work was ordered by someone who lived outside Edo. I would suspect that Hokusai, knowing that the order was from somewhere out of Edo, handed over Oei’s work under his name.”
[12]
Kubota quotes an 1835 letter from Hokusai to the publisher Suzanbo, written when he was hiding in Uraga. In it Hokusai states that he himself will now take over the job commissioned to his daughter. It was a big commission: to illustrate the new
Hyakunin Isshu
(
One Hundred Waka Poems
). This is one of Hokusai’s famous series. Kubota asks: What if this work had been done by Oei, as it was commissioned? Would Hokusai have handed it over as his own?
These are the obvious questions, questions that other art historians speculate about off the record but avoid in print.
More than a few works presented as by Hokusai were actually created by his daughter Oei, Kubota writes: “Particularly the works that were created during Hokusai’s eighties. These works had a lot of bright colors with a youthful touch, as well as an incredibly accurate drawing skill, even though an old man over eighty had supposedly created them.” He singles out Hokusai’s Chinese figures, from the works
Sousou and Red Wall
and
The Successful Kakushigi
. Both have Hokusai’s signature, along with the sign of “age 88,” but both might have been the daughter’s works.
After making his well-substantiated speculations, Kubota ends with the usual academic caution. “My thoughts on the ‘ghost painter’ do not go beyond hypothesis, but certainly her works should be reviewed in parallel with the works of Hokusai.”
[13]
Despite his care in wording, Kubota’s research flies in the face of a century of study that attributes everything to the great master, disabilities and age notwithstanding. He looks at particular pictures, seeing a pattern and seeing an entirely different style emerge. He allows himself to speculate, to link suspicions; he allows himself intuitive leaps that art historians are normally denied. He applies logic where it is badly needed.
The question of the palsy is one such area. Hokusai’s symptoms are described as occurring at two times in his life—when he was in his sixties, in the 1820s, and in his last decade, the 1840s. He stumbles, stutters, and is unable to walk. Lane states that after the death of his second wife, “Hokusai was 68, afflicted intermittently with palsy, troubled by his profligate grandson, but indomitable in his work.”
[14]
According to Lane, Hokusai cured himself with Chinese herbs, meditation, and daily painting exercises. At this point, he had already exceeded the average lifespan by half again, about twenty years. But he went on for twenty more years to make brilliantly conceived and minutely detailed images.
This is a case of begging the question. If he painted the pictures, then the palsy must have been intermittent; he must be indomitable. The experts have put the palsy on hold for the periods when there were fine paintings. What if he didn’t paint the pictures? Certain other paintings of his show an uncontrolled hand. The Japanese curator at the Freer symposium noted: “Some of these paintings from his old age look as if he was drunk!” But what if the disease was persistent?
I sent off messages to the National Library of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and to the Library of Congress. What was “palsy” in Edo in 1825 or 1830? What disease? What did it look like? What was the treatment? Could it be cured? Did it go into remission, to return later? No one found any hard information. Then, quite by accident, I read “Bathhouse of the Floating World” by Hokusai’s contemporary and friend Shikitei Sanba, where a fictional character also suffers palsy.
[15]
Butashichi is only thirty, but he “slouches along like some sort of crawling bug; he was a victim of a kind of palsy popularly known as the yoi-yoi disease.” His speech is slurred and he stutters. He passes out. The charm to bring him around is to write “horse beans” on his back. They also throw water on the spastic, as they call him. He comes to. “All righ’. I-I-I’m f-fine. I p-passed b-back, passed b-back in!” His speech is painful to hear. He stumbles and falls. His legs jerk; he loses his balance and has to be picked up off the ground. It does not sound as if Butashichi will be doing any painting. His remedy, apparently, other than the “horse beans” charm, is to chant the Lotus Sutra.
Strangely, Hokusai is known to have chanted the sutra so diligently he would fail to greet people on the street.
I can hear the academics screaming from here: you can’t use fiction to prove history! No, but we should consider all kinds of evidence when seeking to establish a past reality.
Finding Clues in Oei’s Signed Works
It might have been impossible to separate Oei’s work from her father’s except for one happy fact. She left half a dozen signed paintings in her unique style.
They include
Operating on Guanyu’s Arm,
a hanging scroll painted on silk, owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art. It bears Oei’s signature and her father’s seal. It is likely a commission from a wealthy patron. It is a fierce and gory work illustrating a Chinese legend. General Guanyu has been wounded and is being bled. The exposed bone is being scraped with a knife. Blood flows out of cuts on his arm in a series of small waterfalls. The others turn away, aghast. Food is brought, and the general concentrates on a game of Go, perfectly composed.
The color is deep and saturated. Some of the paint has been applied on the wrong side of the silk, giving a softer effect to the painting—Oei excelled at that difficult technique, notes Kubota. There are the straight, geometrical lines, also seen elsewhere. The figures are concentrated in the center of the frame, in what is also seen as her compositional habit. The lines in the painting are firm, even, and smooth. The details are extremely fine.
Others of Oei’s signed works show her signature style.
Three Women Playing Musical Instruments
in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts depicts women with remarkable long and tapered fingers. The fabrics of their kimono are elaborately decorated. Another is the remarkable
Nighttime in the Yoshiwara
, where Oei develops the use of shadow in a portrayal of prostitutes sitting behind the lattice at twilight. It shows Oei’s compassion for women, deep colors, and fine delineation—so fine that it almost looks like anime.
In
Beauty with Cherry Blossoms at Night
, another of Oei’s signed paintings, in the Menard Art Museum in Komaki, Japan, the beauty is shown seated with paper and brush, next to a lantern. Over her head the gnarled branch of a tree with clots of leaves winds up along the top right edge of the scroll.
In another,
Dragon Flying over Mount Fuji
, the conical mountain is on the left in the middle of the scroll, taking the same shape as the lantern, and a dragon rises up in a trail of smoke to the right and toward the top of the painting, taking the same shape as the tree.
These two, and other images once attributed to Hokusai and now in doubt, suggest a compositional analysis. Laying photographic slides of certain images on top of one another, Kubota sees a certain pattern of shapes repeating eerily and almost exactly. This compositional style he deemed to be hers: characters bunched together in a dense clump in the center of the page and a twisted formation, like a dragon’s tail, leading up to the top border. The background is blank, so rare in Hokusai’s works.
The scholar Carolina Retta, in her essay “Hokusai’s
Treatise on Colouring
,” which deals with Hokusai’s last published book, also talked about composition. “Where a complex central image sat amidst a background simplified to the point of being abstract,” she wrote, “that was Oei’s influence.”
[16]
These and other works help to define style and composition that is not remotely like her father’s.
Oei After Hokusai’s Death: The Question of Chrysanthemums
Hokusai was an “alpha male,” the wisdom goes. You couldn’t beat him. You couldn’t outlive him. The men in his studio were not willing to be subsumed. One by one in Hokusai’s lifetime, they left—Shigenobu, Eisen, many others.
So he had to fall back on women. In the North Star Studio he used a series of women—including the woman painter Hokumei and Oei’s sister Tatsu, who were often willing to work anonymously. Hokusai being one of the few artists who worked with women, they were captive labor: they did not have the option of establishing themselves as artists in their own right or finding another studio.
When Hokusai died, Oei settled his affairs. But the family could not deal with her. She was “difficult,” said John Carpenter, relying on his reading of the calligraphy. For a time she continued to paint, signing some work with his name, some with her own. Why? “Oei wanted her father to take the credit,” he said.
Again, there is some ambivalence between that view and Kobayashi’s, which is that Oei wanted to make it on her own as “one brush.”
Kubota Kazuhiro has unearthed details of at least one commission for Oei alone. “The account book of Takai Kozan reveals that Ei lived at the same address . . . in Asakusa in March 1853, four years after the passing of Hokusai. Ei sent her miniature work titled
The Silk Book: The Illustration of Chrysanthemum
to Kozan in Obuse. Kozan recorded paying ‘2 ryo 2 bu’ in his books for that piece, which is far more than he ever paid to Hokusai.”
[17]
The Kozan estate had owned the Oei works, but at a certain point they disappeared. Strangely, in 1983, the Hokusai Museum bought a pair of paintings, called
Chrysanthemums,
from a dealer in London. A pair of chrysanthemum paintings by Oei had been lost. A pair of chrysanthemum paintings had come back to Obuse from Europe. Only now they were Hokusai’s work.
“The record still remains, but Oei’s work,
Chrysanthemums,
has not been found yet. On the other hand, Hokusai’s
The Illustration of Chrysanthemum
was returned recently from London to the Hokusai Gallery in Obuse. This work has the sign of ‘age 88,’ the same as . . .
Sousou and Red Wall
and
The Successful Kakushigi,
[the other two] miniature paintings on silk.”
[18]
Could these paintings be the work of his daughter?
Furthermore, Kubota found something odd about the signature. Usually the seal and signature were placed near the bottom right-hand side of the panel. But in this case, the signature was up higher and on the left. Kubota showed how the bottom of the scroll might have been cut off and the signature—“Hokusai, age 88”—been put up top.
I met the dealer who sold
Chrysanthemums
to the Obuse Museum—sold it back to the museum, if indeed they are the same works. He described the pair of paintings as “botanicals,” executed with precision and patience, with many overlapping petals drawn with great exactitude. Immensely detailed, brilliant with deep colors, the flowers massed in the center, a thousand little tongued petals artfully created on the difficult silk. The background is blank, no detail.
The dealer preferred to remain anonymous. I will call him Zeller. He is an expert in paintings, as opposed to prints, of the Edo period. He did not mince his words. He identified himself immediately as being among the converted: he believes that Oei painted
Chrysanthemums
and a great deal else.
He bought the pair in the early 1960s, at Phillips auction house. Monday the junk went out, and Tuesday was the good stuff. It was on a Monday when he saw the pair of scrolls. “They are exquisite,” he said. “Every type of chrysanthemum known in Japan is there.”