Mongolian Women Horse Riders

Across of the broad expanse of a pair of six-panel gold-leaf screens, five female horse riders—four on the right screen, one on the left—gallop on their steads during a hunt. Representation of the grassy plains is completely omitted, and the artist relies entirely on the forms of the figures and horses to create a believable sense of movement and spatial depth .Two of the riders are taking aim with a bow and arrow at a rabbit trying to escape between them. Mongol horses, the same species that existed in the time of the equestrian battles of Genghis Khan, are of a stocky build, with short but strong legs and large heads with long manes. Interestingly, four of the five horses are white or grey, which does not seem to be a figment of the artist’s imagination. The American writer and historian Elizabeth Kendall, travelling through southern Mongolia in 1911, observed, "I was struck by the number of white and grey ponies, and was told that horses are bred chiefly for the market in China, and this is the Chinese preference." (Wayfarer in China, 1913, chapter 13). This scene brilliantly captures the excitement of the chase, and at the same time presents an interesting and unexpected twist on the category of Taishō-era bijinga (paintings of beautiful women).

Nihonga artists of the early twentieth century often sought unexpected or foreign subject matter for their paintings, whether inspired by the West or Greater Asia. Of course, underlying the superficially bright and vibrant surface of this painting were the geopolitical realities taking place in Asia of the day. During the early twentieth century Japan had been seeking to gain territory in northern China, especially the prized territory of Manchuria that bordered on Inner and Outer Mongolia. Russia had conceded these territories along with commercial concessions to Japan at the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), and Japanese influence extended into Outer Manchuria in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, around the time this painting was created. Even though there is no record of Hōshō ever traveling to Manchuria, like many Japanese artist, there was interest in depicting themes related to the contested territories on the Chinese continent. It is possible that Hōshō received inspiration from Japanese newspaper reporters and artists who created live sketches at the warfront, which often included the life of the countryside in their stories and drawings. Hōshō had exhibited a similar pair of screens of women hunting with a hawk in the eleventh Bunten exhibit in 1917.

Hikida Hōshō was a regular exhibitor at Bunten exhibitions beginning from the first such exhibition in 1907, when he was twenty-nine, until the twelfth Bunten of 1918. Later, he exhibited works in the 1920 and 1931 Teiten exhibitions, earning the title of “Mukansa,” meaning that he had achieved such a solid reputation that he no longer had to submit works for approval by the jury. Hōshō, however, eventually acquired a reputation as a reclusive artist, operating outside normal art societies and eschewing publicity; he is said to have lived a simple life and worked in a rather primitive atelier.