Morita Kakō

Morita Kakō 森田華香 (active c. 1904-1930)

BIOGRAPHY

Nothing is known about the personal life of this nihonga artist who designed both war prints (sensō-e) during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and bird and flower prints (kachō-e) from about 1910 through 1930. As a nihonga artist, he created a number of ink on silk works, one of which is shown below.  

Morita designed prints for at least two different publishers during his career - Akiyama Buemon (Kokkeidō), who published a number of the artist's landscape prints, and Matsuki Heikichi (Daikokuya), who published the artist's twenty-or-so kachō-e and his four known Russo-Japanese War prints. 

A sampling of prints published by Akiyama Buemon (Kokkeidō), c. 1910-1930

(print titles are descriptive)

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A sampling of prints attributed to Matsuki Heikichi (Daikokuya), c. 1910-1930

(print titles are descriptive)

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Prints published by Matsuki Heikichi (Daikokuya), 1904

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A painting of Morita's titled Late Autumn was awarded honors at the 4th exhibition of Jitsu-getsu Association 日月会  (The Sun and Moon Association) and reproduced in the November 20, 1904 issue of the art magazine Bijutsu Gaho.1  He also contributed one or more illustrations to the popular magazine Fuzoku Gaho, the first graphic magazine produced in Japan. Records of The American Art Association, which offered four of Morita's ink on silk paintings in their 1901 New York auction, list his works under "Paintings from the Pupils of Professor Okakuya's (sic) [Okakura Tenshin 岡倉 天心 (1863-1913)] Art Institute, Tōkyō" providing the only information I've been able to discover on Morita's training as an artist.2  

Confused with Tsuji Kakō

Morita is often confused with another, and better known, nihonga artist Tsuji Kakō 都路華香 (1870/1871-1931), who was not a print designer. Adding to this confusion is that Morita's birth and death dates, when given, are often identical to Tsuji's. This, of course, may just be a true coincidence. While both artists used "Kakō", spelled with the same kanji characters 華香, comparison of their signatures and seals, shown below, strongly suggests that they are two different artists. In addition, the name Morita has never been associated with Tsuji Kakō, whose work is found in many museums and whose biographical details are well known.

Is Morita Kakō the Scientific Illustrator Morita Kako (aka K.M.)? 

Yes, this is confirmed by Ai Nonaka of the Division of Fishes at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in her just published paper on the artist titled "Kako Morita: A Japanese Artist and His Struggle to Survive as a Scientific Illustrator of Fishes and Other Natural History Specimens in Early 20th Century America."*

*https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/MFR-86-1_Nonaka.pdf 

Could this botanical illustrator be the same Morita Kakō who created beautiful kachō-e as shown above?

The website of the University of Minnesota Natural History Museum has a number of Morita's botanical illustrations and provides the following information on the artist:4

The scientific illustrator Kakō also had connections with Stanford University's David Starr Jordan (1851-1931), who mentions him in his memoirs as providing "paintings of fifty of the most brilliant species" later published in 1906 in The Fishes of Samoa.5 A "Morita, Kako, Assistant Artist, 1902-03" is also listed under faculty in the Stanford University 1921 Alumni Directory and Ten-Year Book III 1891-1920.6 This Morita also worked at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and his name appears multiple times in their 1910 yearbook.7 His botanical illustrations of cacti can be found in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which carries the following biographical notes on the artist.8 

It is worth noting the year 1904, the date of Morita's hiring by Henry Nachtrieb and Thomas Sadler Roberts, as mentioned above, would have coincided with the year his teacher Okakura Tenshin moved to Boston to take up his position at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Rhiannon Piaget, in her notes on the artist Morita Kakō in Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan, writes:9

1 Website of Independent Administrative Institution National Institutes for Cultural Heritage https://www.tobunken.go.jp/materials/gahou/210521.html

2 Japanese Pictorial Art..., American Art Association, 1901, p. 17 https://archive.org/stream/b15164895/b15164895_djvu.txt

3 University of Stuttgart Database of Scientific Illustrators https://dsi.hi.uni-stuttgart.de/index.php?tablename=dsi&function=search&where_clause=&order=lastname&order_type=ASC&page=768

4 University of Minnesota https://editions.lib.umn.edu/naturalhistorymn/2013/08/30/friday-flora-nature-and-art/

5 The Days of a Man Being Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of Democracy · Volume Two 1900-1921, World Book Company, 1922, p. 117.

6 https://www.google.com/books/edition/Alumni_Directory_and_Ten_year_Book/6rAPAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=morita+kako&pg=PA42&printsec=frontcover] 

7 Carnegie Institution of Washington, Year Book, No. 9, 1920, published by the Institution, 1921, p. 120, 122, 127, 255.

8 Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/?ti=6]

9 Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan, Philip K. Hu, et. al., Saint Louis Museum of Art, 2016, p. 214.

last revision:

4/2/2025

4/22/2020 created

Prints in Collection

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