Early Life
Taikan was born in Mito city, Ibaraki Prefecture, as the eldest son of Sakai Sutehiko, an ex-samurai family in Mito clan. He was adopted into his mother's family, from whom he received the name of "Yokoyama". With his family, he moved to Tokyo in 1878. He studied at the Tōkyō Furitsu Daiichi Chūgakkō (Hibiya High School), and was interested in the English language and in western style oil painting. This led him to study pencil drawing with a painter, Watanabe Fumisaburo. He also studied at one of the great painters, Kanō Hōgai, who was the master of Kanō school.
In 1889, Taikan enrolled in the first graduating class of the Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō (the predecessor to the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music), which had just been opened by Okakura Kakuzō (aka Okakura Tenshin). In school, he studied under the Kanō school artist Hashimoto Gahō. At the time, the following were his classmates and became famous artists later: Hishida Shunsō, Shimomura Kanzan, and Saigō Kogetsu.
After graduation, Taikan spent a year teaching at "Kyōto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō" (the predecessor to the Kyoto City University of Arts) in Kyoto, studying Buddhist painting. Around that time, he started to use his "Taikan" pseudonym. He returned to Tokyo in 1896 as assistant professor at the Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō. He resigned that position only a year later, when his mentor, Okakura Kakuzō (aka Okakura Tenshin), was forced to resign for political reasons, and joined Okakura in establishing the Japan Fine Arts Academy (Nihon Bijutsu-in).
After the death of his wife, Taikan traveled extensively overseas, visiting Calcutta, New York, Boston, London, Berlin and Paris.
Read more about this topic: Yokoyama Taikan
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“The more the development of late capitalism renders obsolete or at least suspect the real possibilities of self, self- fulfillment and actualization, the more they are emphasized as if they could spring to life through an act of will alone.”
—Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949)