Yamaguchi Kaoru began frequently painting horses and cows from around the time of his 1950 work Horse Rising at Dusk. He also began painting his eldest daughter Ayako in 1950, when Ayako was eight. He then depicted a cow named Hanako in his 1951 work The Birth of Hanako (Museum of Modern Art, Gunma), while 1951’s Mother and Child (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo) portrays a mother horse and foal and a human mother and child in a similar fashion. Another favorite subject was his beloved Kai Ken dog Kuma, a gift from his wife Masa’s elder brother in 1962.

This painting is perhaps the last Yamaguchi work to focus solely on horses. He continued to paint horses thereafter, but they were depicted standing before the sun or moon. This Two Horses (Kyobashi-kai Oil Painting Exhibition, Kyobashi Gallery) follows on from another Two Horses that Yamaguchi had painted the year before in 1962, with both thought to portray the same horses. The two works also share a similar composition. A taller horse stands to the left, its nose dappled with a patch of white hair near the eyes, while a shorter horse with a lighter shade of hair stands on the right. Two horses with similar features also appear in When the Snow Falls (the Eighth Joritsu-kai Exhibition, Sakamoto Gallery), a work dated to around 1963. There is a clear difference between the works from this era featuring solely horses and later paintings that portray horses with the sun or moon in the background. The depiction of the horses in this work is perhaps colored by the influence of the parent-child relationship. Yamaguchi often painted equine parents and their offspring during this period. Horses remained a common theme in subsequent works, though these were either pictured amid expansive landscapes, such as pasturelands or marshes, or shown standing before the moon or an annular eclipse, as seen in paintings from 1968, his final year. These horses are viewed from the high vantage point that existed within Yamaguchi’s imagination. This work was painted in 1963 based on his conception of real horses. In contrast, the horses seen in 1968’s Dancing Under a Young Moon (Museum of Modern Art, Gunma) and other late-period works probably represent his symbolic conceptions of life, as contraposed against the sun, the moon, and other aspects of nature.

In Yamaguchi’s own words, “Does the act of creation lie in painting or erasing? For me, the latter became more prominent.” Yamaguchi was ultimately an artist who created a richer symbolism through ‘erasure.’

Yamaguchi Kaoru (painter; 1907–1968)
Painter from Gunma Prefecture. Yamaguchi graduated from the Western Painting Department of the Tokyo Fine Arts School. Early in his career, he travelled extensively through Europe and Egypt, and his works soon became a fixture at the Teiten and Kokuga-kai exhibitions. He played a central role in establishing the Exhibition of Western-style Art for New Age and founded the Free Artists Association and Modern Art Association. In 1958, Yamaguchi received the Mainichi Newspaper Fine Art Prize and the National Section Award (Japan) of the Guggenheim International Award (1958). In 1960, he was awarded the Ministry of Education Art Prize. He participated in the International Exhibition of Figurative Arts and in 1964 was named a professor of Tokyo University of the Arts.