Shunsō was born in 1874 in what is now part of
Iida city in
Nagano Prefecture. In 1889 he moved to Tokyo to study under
Kanō school artist Yuki Masaaki (1834–1904). The following year, he enrolled at the
Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō (the forerunner of the
Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). Shunsō was one year junior to his colleagues
Yokoyama Taikan and
Shimomura Kanzan; his teacher was
Hashimoto Gahō. Shunsō, Taikan and Kanzan were heavily influenced by
Okakura Tenshin and
Ernest Fenollosa during their time at the
Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō. After graduation, Shunsō was commissioned by the Imperial Household Museum (now the
Tokyo National Museum) to copy important religious paintings at
Buddhist temples in
Kyoto and
Nara, and he also became a teacher at the
Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō (present-day
Tokyo University of the Arts)). In 1898, he joined Okakura Tenshin in establishing the
Nihon Bijutsuin. From 1903 to 1905, he traveled extensively overseas, holding exhibitions of his works in India, the United States and Europe. After his return to Japan, Shunsō successfully competed in many national exhibitions in Japan, including the government-sponsored
Bunten. Shunsō developed a new painting method, derogatorily named by his contemporaries as
moro-tai (vague style). This new method used a gradation of colors to replace the line drawings that characterized traditional Japanese-style painting. This new style, however, gained little support from Shunsō's contemporaries and was severely criticized by
art critics. Shunsō came to realize that while
moro-tai was effective in depicting such scenes as morning mist and evening glow, its color gradation technique proved good only for those limited motifs. Shunsō began integrating his original
moro-tai with line drawing to overcome this disadvantage, and his later works exhibit a new style which came to typify the
Nihonga genre, distinguishing it from the more restrictive styles of traditional Japanese-style painting. In his final years, Shunsō suffered from renal, or
kidney disease. Driven by fear of blindness, Shunsō painted frantically whenever his illness entered a state of remission. In 1909, his work
Ochiba won the highest award at the third
Bunten Exhibition. It is now designated an
Important Cultural Property by the Japanese government's
Agency for Cultural Affairs and is now in the collection of the
Eisei Bunko Museum, Tokyo. His representative work "Ochiba" is based on the motif of a thicket of trees around Yoyogi, Tokyo, Japan, which was still a suburb at the time. His work
Black Cat (1910) has also been designated an Important Cultural Property. In 1911, he died of kidney disease (nephritis) just before his 37th birthday. A large retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo’s Art Museum Special Gallery in 2014. == Philately ==