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拍品專文
Koun was a craftsman with traditional skills who was forced to adapt to the modern world in an era of dramatic change. He apprenticed with a Buddhist sculptor in 1863 and found himself fully trained just as the art of the Buddhist sculptor ceased to exist. He determined to continue in the profession of sculptor but with assiduous training in Western realism, which he admired. Thus, with the advent of the Meiji period, he was able to adjust his product to suit new Westernized taste and the needs of purely secular government-sponsored exhibition venues. In 1889 he accepted a position of teaching at the newly established Tokyo Art School (now Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music).
Koun worked in a highly realistic style in wood, ivory and bronze. His bronze statue of the 14th-century warrior Kusunoki Masashige, completed in 1900, stands in front of the Imperial Palace, Tokyo, and his 1898 statue of Saigo Takamori, a hero of the Meiji Restoration, is a landmark in Ueno Park, Tokyo. He won international fame with his wood sculpture, The Old Monkey, exhibited in Chicago in 1893 at the Columbian World's Exposition (see Ueno Naoteru, ed., Japanese Arts and Crafts of the Meiji Era, translated by Richard Lane [Tokyo: Pan Pacific Press, 1958], figs. 62a and b). The miniature pair of Guardian Kings here were created for exhibition.
At the request of Okakura Kakuzo, Koun became a founding member of the Japan Sculpture Society, concerned with the propagation of Japanese-style sculpture in wood. The group had its first exhibition in the fall of 1908. Koun's son, Takamura Kotaro, a poet and sculptor, chose to abandon the traditional ways of his father and fell under the influence of Rodin.
Koun worked in a highly realistic style in wood, ivory and bronze. His bronze statue of the 14th-century warrior Kusunoki Masashige, completed in 1900, stands in front of the Imperial Palace, Tokyo, and his 1898 statue of Saigo Takamori, a hero of the Meiji Restoration, is a landmark in Ueno Park, Tokyo. He won international fame with his wood sculpture, The Old Monkey, exhibited in Chicago in 1893 at the Columbian World's Exposition (see Ueno Naoteru, ed., Japanese Arts and Crafts of the Meiji Era, translated by Richard Lane [Tokyo: Pan Pacific Press, 1958], figs. 62a and b). The miniature pair of Guardian Kings here were created for exhibition.
At the request of Okakura Kakuzo, Koun became a founding member of the Japan Sculpture Society, concerned with the propagation of Japanese-style sculpture in wood. The group had its first exhibition in the fall of 1908. Koun's son, Takamura Kotaro, a poet and sculptor, chose to abandon the traditional ways of his father and fell under the influence of Rodin.