Kobayakawa Shusei initially studied with the Nihonga painter Taniguchi Kokyo. While enrolled at Kyoto Municipal School of Painting, he also traveled to China to study literati painting, hence from a young age he strove to absorb a comprehensive range of influences. From his first successful submission to the eighth Bunten Exhibition in 1914 (with After the Echo Died Down) to the Special Wartime Bunten Exhibition of 1944, Shusei had his works accepted almost every year to the most important annual exhibitions, over time becoming an indispensable fixture of the Japanese art world. Although many of his portraits subtly focus on the inner experience of the person shown, Shusei may today be mostly remembered as a war painter. This is because after the portrait Genghis Khan, his submission to the thirteenth Teiten Exhibition of 1932, he would produce a succession of nationalistically themed paintings such as Defense, Defending the Country or Autumn in a Nation at War.

Shusei through the maternal side of his family was a relative of Viscount Kuki Takayoshi (1837–1891), the fourteenth head of the Kuki clan, which traced its lineage back to the ninth century. The financial means of his family allowed him to travel abroad extensively. In 1909, at twenty-four, he visited Beijing and studied East Asian art for one and a half years. In 1920, aged thirty-five, Shusei traveled to Europe, including Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, then went on to the Near and Middle East and eventually Southeast Asia, only to return in the next year to Europe for another two years, mainly to study art at Berlin’s Altes Museum. Shusei thus possessed an extraordinary international experience for a Japanese painter of his day. The works he created during these years of constant travel were included in his solo exhibition at the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Osaka in 1925, one year after his return to Japan. After the war, Shusei became a jury member of the Nitten exhibitions, but health-related issues prevented him from sustaining his artistic activity on a level like the prewar era. It was these circumstances that prompted Shusei to work on a series of small paintings based on the memories of his travels, Twelve Months of the World (c. 1947, 41.8 x 47.5 cm each; note that the Japanese character for “month” also means “moon”).

The group of works introduced here is closely related to Twelve Months of the World, with many of the same countries and the same places covered, though most of the compositions are different. On a previous mounting, before the paintings received their current frames, there were handwritten titles to each work, perhaps written by the artist himself, the individual titles are as follows:
 
Evening Moon at the Great Wall of China
Moon above Borobodur, Java
Moon at Dawn in Arabia
Evening Moon in Rangoon, Birma
Milan Cathedral with Moon behind Clouds
Moon and Cherry Blossoms at the Potomac River, Washington
Evening Moon in Manhattan, New York
 
With the moon as a topic, Shusei recalled his life’s rich experiences from traveling around the world. These works are remarkable in how they evoke grandiose places and sceneries from all over the world on such a charmingly small format.

Update March 2022:
At the recent retrospective Kobayakawa Shusei: A Life of Journey and Requiem (Museum of Kyoto and others, 2021), a previously little known set of sixteen works similar to Moon of the World came to light, dated 1923–24. The corresponding theme, technique and format (size) suggest both sets may have been painted as part of the same series, indicating the present works also could date to the early-to-mid 1920s, more than twenty years earlier than the Twelve Months of the World.

Kobayakawa Shusei (nihonga painter; 1887–1974)
Nihonga painter born in Hyogo Prefecture. Shusei dropped out of the Kyoto Municipal School of Painting (now Kyoto City University of Arts) and studied privately with the Nihonga painter Taniguchi Kokyo and, later, Yamamoto Shunkyo. A member of the Sanae-kai art association, Shusei regularly exhibited at the Bunten and Teiten exhibitions. He traveled abroad widely and used these opportunities to study Western and Asian art. He was enlisted during the war as a military painter. After 1945, Kobayakawa turned his attention towards religious subject matter.