The Yamatane Museum of Art, which opened in 1966 as Japan's first art museum specializing in Nihonga, celebrates its fifty-fifth anniversary in 2021. To commemorate that milestone, we have been holding special exhibitions throughout the year. The finale of that series is an exhibition of the work of Uemura Shōen (1875-1949), a nihonga artist who had close ties with our museum, and her eldest son, Uemura Shōkō (1902-2001), who would be 120 years old this year.

Uemura Shōen, a female artist famed for her bijinga (paintings of beautiful women), depicted women of elegant grace throughout her life. She showed her paintings of women with themes taken from Edo- and Meiji-period manners and customs and the Chinese and Japanese classics in many exhibitions. Highly regarded for her bijinga, she became in 1948 the first woman to be awarded the Order of Culture. Our museum's founder and first director, Yamazaki Taneji, was on friendly terms with Shōen and collected her works. The museum now owns eighteen of her paintings, including the masterpieces Scene from the Noh Play Kinuta and Feathered Snow.

Uemura Shōkō, Shōen's eldest son, excelled at kachōga (bird-and-flower paintings). He continued to paint refined, elegant images of birds and flowers, with realism as their core, while leading the Kyoto art world. He was awarded the Order of Culture in 1984.

This exhibition presents the eighteen bijinga by Shōen and nine bird-and-flower paintings by Shōkō in our collection, showing them together for the first time. It also includes works by Shōkō's eldest son Uemura Atsushi and other superb works by artists active at the same time. We hope you will enjoy this gorgeous and elegant world of bijinga and bird-and-flower paintings.