In 18th century in Kyoto, where all sorts of painting schools were in full bloom, Maruyama Ōkyo dominated the era with his naturalistic styled painting and established his own school, the Maruyama School. One of his apprentices, Goshun, also studied under Yosa Buson and started a new school called the Shijō School, which added elegant sentimentalism to the naturalism of Maruyama School.
These two schools created together the mainstream of Kyoto’s painting circle, Maruyama-Shijō School, which had been enormously influential until the modern era.
This exhibition overviews the lineage of the school from the origin of Ōkyo and Goshun and traces the school’s descendants until the pre-modern and modern painters at once, including Nagasawa Rosetsu, Watanabe Nangaku, Ganku, Kishi Chikudō, Kōno Bairei, Shiokawa Bunrin, Mori Tetsuzan, Kikuchi Hōbun, Takeuchi Seihō, Yamamoto Shunkyo, and Uemura Shōen.
In addition, the exhibition carefully explores the characteristics of expression in detail by setting some themes such as nature, people and animals. This unprecedentedly large-scaled Maruyama-Shijō School reveals the whole picture of the genealogy and legacy of the painters of the school which marks a significant position in the history of Japanese art.