Abstract
Kiyo-o Kawamura (1852-1934) is one of the earliest Japanese painters who studied western style painting in Europe. Although the painter's main field was history painting, his style has been said to be a decorative one. But the meaning of the word is left vague. How can a painter make history paintings in a decorative style?
To resolve this problem we apply the method of Rusu Moyo (“Absent Pattern”) to the painter’s masterpiece Kenkoku (“The Opening of the New Era”). Rusu Moyo is a composing method used mainly on Japanese traditional crafts. In the method, the main characters of the depicted story are absent from the scene. Instead, only the some attributes of the characters appear on the picture surface. Only good appreciators can enjoy the meaning and story of the works.
In this paper, we insist that we can understand Kawamura’s Kenkoku more deeply by adopting this method. The picture turns out to be a mythological painting without gods.
