We are proud to present an exhibition of the work of one of Japan’s representative painters of the modern era, Uemura Shoen. A women painter, Shoen is well known for her paintings of beauties showing strong will and dignified grace. She is also a painter who left an especially large number of drawings and sketches. This exhibition brings together a selection of Shoen drawings, studies and a group of her beautifully colored finished paintings. These select works are displayed along with a number of the artist’s personal possessions in hopes of giving the viewer new insights into the secrets of the artist’s working method, the exquisite beauty of her lines and even her nature as an artist and person.

She made a habit of carrying around small sketchpads she fashioned herself from glassine paper and used them to do studies of famous paintings of the past, sketches of people in different postures and expressions and studies of plants and trees. These sketchpads full of myriad visual information were priceless assets for Shoen as a painter. In the drawings of objects such as combs, hairpins and Noh masks that she did as studies for paintings, we can see the eye of the artist at work. In her sketches of people we feel the lively movements of her brush that give these drawings a different appeal from the artist’s finished paintings.

The viewer will see changes in the artist’s style and expressive content during the course of her career, exemplified by the masterwork Hanagatami (Flower Basket), with its depiction of pathos and madness, and the painting Tsuzumi no Ne (Sounds of the Tabor) from the artist’s mature period that portrays deep thought behind a quiet expression. At the same time, elements in her paintings showing us the old-world flavor of Kyoto and the temperament of the Edo Period, and the way the artist uses scenes from Noh plays to express sublime thoughts and emotions in the highest realms of the human spirit, all drawn us into the compelling artistic world of Uemura Shoen.

Although feminine beauty is the subject of many of her paintings, the ability of the artist to delve into the inner thoughts and soul of her subjects raises them above the vulgarity the genre often falls to. Surely we can find some of the secrets of how the artist achieves this unassailable dignity in the revealing directness of the sketches and studies she left. An especially large number of sketches done for the representative work Hanagatami (Flower Basket)remain, and the final painting is exhibited in this show along with numerous examples of these studies.

This exhibition has been organized with the full cooperation of the Shouhaku Art Museum (Nara), known for its rich collection of works by the three generations of Uemura’s (Shoen, Shoko and Atsushi). In it we present seven representative Shoen paintings along with about 80 studies and drawings and a number of personal possessions of the artist such as brushes and the Order of Culture medallion presented to the artist by the Japanese Government.