September 1, 1923 大正12年9月1日

People silently walking through the debris, carrying all they have left, surrounded by the dark clouds of smoke from the flames. In this enormous image, Kanokogi Takeshiro, a Western-style painter, depicts the scene on September 1, 1923, the day of the great Kanto earthquake. When Kanokogi, who was living in Kyoto, got news of the disaster, he talked his neighbor, Nihonga (modern Japanese-style) painter Ikeda Yoson into traveling with him to Tokyo, to sketch and photograph the horrific scenes resulting from the earthquake. Our museum has 50 of those sketches in its collection. Kanokogi combined motifs from his sketches and photographs to produce this large painting, which reflects the influence of his three stays in France as a student. Here we see a full development of Academic elements he had learned from his teacher, Jean-Paul Laurens, an artist who specialized in history painting. To Kanokogi, who had wondered if it were possible to produce history paintings, in oils, in Japan, this massive event suddenly striking Japan was an opportunity to employ all the techniques he had built up to explore the potential of this type of painting. Having stood face-to-face with unprecedented tragedy, the artist coolly used his collected sketches and photographs to create a painting that could serve to transmit to future generations an accurate record of what had happened.