The Imperial Household Artists system, 1890–1944

Between 1890 and 1944 the Imperial Household appointed seventy-nine artists as Teishitsu Gigeiin, Artists to the Imperial Household. The title is often cited on objects and in catalogues. This essay sets out what the appointment table records: who was appointed, when, and in which fields. It then asks what the title can and cannot tell a reader about a given work.

The institution

The system was created in 1890. Appointees received a stipend of 100 yen a year. They submitted a work on appointment and accepted commissions, some of them for presentation to foreign dignitaries.¹ The fullest list is the appointment table in Japanese Wikipedia, which cites each appointment to the official gazette, the Kanpō. That table is the basis of our own list of all seventy-nine appointees, with their fields and dates.²

Thirteen appointment dates

Appointments came in groups rather than singly. Counting from the table, there were ten appointments on 2 October 1890; four on 25 September 1893; eleven on 30 June 1896; one each in 1898 and 1900; four in 1904; seven on 4 April 1906; two in 1910; two in 1913; eleven on 11 June 1917; one in 1931; ten on 3 December 1934; and fifteen on 1 July 1944.² The total is seventy-nine.

The first group of 1890 was dominated by painters and sculptors. It included the lacquer master Shibata Zeshin, the metal chaser 加納夏雄 and the sculptor Takamura Kōun. Zeshin died the following July, so his tenure lasted less than a year.² The first potter followed in 1893: Seifū Yohei III, appointed on 25 September of that year. A Bonhams cataloguer calls him “the first ceramicist to be appointed an Imperial Artist”, which agrees with the table.²³

The group of 30 June 1896 is the one most often met in the decorative arts. Alongside painters and an architect, it included Unno Shōmin (metal carving), Miyagawa Kōzan (ceramics), Namikawa Sōsuke and Namikawa Yasuyuki (cloisonné), Suzuki Chōkichi (casting) and two maki-e lacquerers.² The 1906 group added Kagawa Katsuhiro (metal carving), the lacquerer 白山松哉, two swordsmiths, a seal carver and a designer.²

Fields

The table assigns each appointee a field. Painters of all kinds account for 44 of the seventy-nine. The other fields, with the number of appointees, are: sculpture 6, potter 3, maki-e lacquer 3, crafts 3, textiles 2, metal chasing 2, architecture 2, metal carving 2, cloisonné 2, swordsmith 2, lacquer 1, ceramics 1, casting 1, seal carving 1, design 1, photography 1, modelled sculpture 1, hammered metal 1.² The categories are those of the source. “Metal carving” (金彫), “metal chasing” (彫金), “casting” (鋳業) and “hammered metal” (鍛金) are distinguished, so that metalworkers appear under four headings, and later appointments use the broad heading “crafts” (工芸).²

For a reader of objects, the decorative-arts appointees of the Meiji era form a short list: in lacquer, Shibata Zeshin and the maki-e artists; in metal, Unno Shōmin, Suzuki Chōkichi and Kagawa Katsuhiro, among others; in ceramics, Seifū Yohei III and Miyagawa Kōzan; and in cloisonné, the two Namikawa. Several of them have pages on this site, each with the appointment date from the table.

After Meiji

The system outlived the Meiji era by more than three decades. The 1910 appointments included the Western-style painter Kuroda Seiki and the photographer Ogawa Kazumasa, a sign that new media could be recognised. The large group of 1917 included two potters (伊東陶山 and 諏訪蘇山) and a hammered-metal artist (平田宗幸). The appointments of the 1930s and 1944 were overwhelmingly painters and sculptors, with a few crafts artists such as the potter Itaya Hazan in 1934.²

What the title does not tell us

Appointment honoured a person, not an object. A work by an appointee may date from before the appointment or after it, and it may come from a large workshop whose head held the title. Catalogues that describe a piece as an “imperial presentation” vase make a separate claim, usually resting on imperial crests, documented history or a presentation box. Christie’s, for example, catalogued a cloisonné vase signed Hattori Kin sei with two imperial mon as an imperial presentation piece, although no Hattori appears in the appointment table.⁴²

Many makers prized by collectors were never appointed. Neither Yabu Meizan nor any head of the Kinkōzan workshop appears in the table, though both exhibited widely and are among the best represented makers in our auction database.²⁵⁶ Their absence is a reminder that the title reflected the choices of the Imperial Household and its advisers, not a general ranking of quality.

Evidence on objects

In practice the title appears in three ways. The first is in biographies, where it is a matter of record and can be checked against the gazette. The second is in signatures, where some appointees added it to their marks; each case has to be read on the object. The third is in commerce, where it can be used loosely. Our practice is to give the appointment date from the table for every appointee on our maker pages, and to say plainly when a maker was not appointed.²

Before and after appointment

Museum records show how much of an appointee’s best-known work can predate the title. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s peacock incense burner by Suzuki Chōkichi was shown at Paris in 1878 and bought from the dealer Siegfried Bing; the museum’s registers record the acquisition in 1883, thirteen years before Chōkichi’s appointment in 1896.⁷² The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates a writing box with a gourd by Shibata Zeshin to 1886, four years before he was appointed in the first group of 1890.⁸² The lacquerer Shirayama Shōsai, appointed on 4 April 1906, had already won awards at Paris in 1900 and St Louis in 1904, according to the Khalili Collections.⁹²

A note on the sources

Our count and field names follow the Japanese Wikipedia table, and English names are given where an English article is linked. Death dates in the table sometimes differ by a few days from individual biographies. For Namikawa Sōsuke, for example, the table gives 14 February 1910, while his own Japanese article gives 9 February. We report the table and note such differences where we find them.²¹⁰ A fuller study would use the Kanpō entries themselves and the research bulletin of the Museum of the Imperial Collections, which we list in the Library.