Abstract
Taki Katei (1830–1901) was once the highest-paid artist in Tokyo, a leading master of bunjinga (literati painting), and the only painter to be included in the Meiji hyakketsuden (Biographies of One Hundred Meiji Greats) of 1902. His works represented Japan at international expositions and graced the imperial palace. Despite Katei’s fame in his lifetime, he virtually disappeared from art history after the early 1920s. Only one small museum has ever devoted an exhibition to him. His fading from Japan’s collective consciousness underscores several “historiographical, disciplinary, and conceptual issues” (p. 2) that are the subject of Rosina Buckland’s Painting Nature for the Nation: Taki Katei and the Challenges to Sinophile Culture in Meiji Japan.