Goseda Yoshimatsu
Legendary Artist
Goseda Yoshimatsu (五姓田義松) was born on 12 June 1855 in Edo (now Tokyo) in the latter years of the Tokugawa shogunate. His father was Goseda Hōryū I (1827-1892), an artist who used western-style painting techniques while also continuing with traditional Japanese art. This background in an artistic family made it possible for Yoshimatsu to be acquainted with drawing and painting at a young age and provided him with the basic training for his future career. Yoshimatsu is unique compared with many other artists of his generation who started off in Japanese painting traditions such as Kanō or ukiyo-e before adopting western techniques later in life. At the age of ten in 1865, Yoshimatsu began his tutelage under the British illustrator and journalist Charles Wirgman, who was living in Yokohama at the time. He learnt techniques of perspective, anatomy, oil painting, watercolour and realism, which were not known in Japan at the time. His exceptional skills soon brought him into wide recognition. He joined the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō (Technical Fine Arts School) in 1876 under the tutelage of Antonio Fontanesi, an Italian painter. Fontanesi taught European academic realism and landscape painting in Japan, thereby influencing greatly the first generation of Western artists during the Meiji period. Yoshimatsu was skilled artistically before joining the school, but his studies with Fontanesi enhanced his skills in composition and observation.