Nihonga

When oil painting arrived from Europe in the 1870s it was called Western painting, or yōga; the painting Japan already had came to be called nihonga. The word first appeared in 1882, as the translation of “Japanese painting” in Ernest Fenollosa's lecture The True Theory of Art. The Tokyo Fine Arts School, opened in 1889, taught only nihonga and no Western painting. Its main pigments are grains of crushed minerals, which do not stick on their own and are mixed with animal glue; it is mostly painted on silk or Japanese paper. The Yamatane Museum of Art, opened in 1966, was the first museum in Japan devoted to nihonga.

Look at the surface from an angle: the coarser the mineral grains, the darker and more vivid the color; the finer, the paler and whiter.

Does the same color look the same in different parts of the picture?

• Yōga 洋画→The counterpart name, for oil painting from Europe.