Matsusaburō Yokoyama

Who They Were

Matsusaburō Yokoyama (1838–1884) was a Japanese photographer, painter, lithographer, and teacher active in the final years of the Edo period and the early Meiji era. Born on 10 October 1838 on the island of Iturup, then under Japanese control, he became one of the first Japanese practitioners of photography and a pioneer of stereographic photography. He also worked as an engineer and architectural photographer, and he taught both photography and lithography at the Japanese Military Academy.

Yokoyama was born Yokoyama Bunroku (横山 文六). His family moved to Hakodate early in his life, and it was there that he first encountered photography in 1854, when he saw daguerreotypes made by Eliphalet Brown, Jr. and A. F. Mozhaiskii. At fifteen he was apprenticed to a kimono dealer, but his interest turned to painting. A few years later he worked as an assistant to the Russian painter Lehman, helping sketch the surroundings of the Russian Consulate in Hakodate and absorbing Western painting techniques.

Life and Career

Seeking to improve his landscape painting, Yokoyama took up photography. He travelled to Yokohama to study under Shimooka Renjō, then returned to Hakodate to study under the Russian consul, I. A. Goshkevich. In 1868 he opened his own commercial photographic studio in Yokohama. That same year he moved the studio to Ryōgoku in Tokyo, naming it Tsūten-rō (通天楼); later he relocated it a short distance to Ueno Ikenohata.

In 1868 Yokoyama met Ninagawa Noritane, an official in the Meiji government. Ninagawa commissioned him to photograph Edo Castle before its imminent reconstruction, and also the Imperial treasures housed in the Shōsōin. The project ran from 1871 to 1872. Some of the resulting work appeared in 1872 as an album of 64 photographs titled Kyū-Edo-jō Shashin-chō (旧江戸城写真帳, Photograph Album of the former Edo Castle). In 1878 a revised version was republished as an album of 73 photographs under the title Kanko Zusetsu, Jokakau-no-bu (History and description of Japanese arts and industries, part one, the castle). Some of Yokoyama's photographs of Japanese art works were presented at the 1873 Vienna Exposition.

Yokoyama was the first Japanese photographer to seriously pursue stereographic photography. An early photograph of his studio equipment shows seven cameras, two of them stereographic. From 1869 onward, accompanied by friends and students, he travelled throughout Japan making stereoviews. He produced at least three series of views published at the time, though they are now very hard to find. According to photography historian Rob Oechsle, Yokoyama's are the only notable Japanese-made stereographic series from the early Meiji period; they were taken from 1869 through the 1870s.

In 1870, Shimooka Renjō invited Yokoyama to join him in photographing Mount Nikkō-Shirane. The resulting photographs, under both their names, were subsequently presented to the Tokugawa clan.

Yokoyama opened an art school in 1873. Its students included the painters Kamei Shiichi, Kamei Takejiro, and Yamada Nariaki, and the photographers Azusawa Ryōichi, Kikuchi Shingaku, Nakajima Matsuchi, and Suzuki Shin'ichi. In 1876 he gave the rights to his studio to his assistant Oda Nobumasa and became a lecturer at the Japanese Military Academy, teaching photography and lithography.

In 1881, a recurrence of the tuberculosis he had first caught around the age of fifteen forced him to leave his post at the Military Academy. He nevertheless founded the Shashin Sekiban-sha (Photolithography Company), continued to paint, and around this time created what he called shashin abura-e (寫眞油繪 in the orthography of the time, 写真油絵 now), or "photographic oil-paintings", in which the paper support of a photograph was overpainted with oil colour. He died on 15 October 1884 at Ichigaya Kamegaoka Hachimangū.

Why They Matter

Yokoyama stands at the intersection of several firsts in Japanese visual culture. He was among the earliest Japanese photographers to open a commercial studio, and he was the first to work seriously in stereographic photography, producing multiple published series at a time when almost no other Japanese photographer did. His commissioned documentation of Edo Castle and the Shōsōin treasures preserved images of structures and objects that were about to be altered or dispersed, and those photographs reached an international audience at the 1873 Vienna Exposition.

His teaching mattered as much as his own work. Through his art school and his lectures at the Military Academy, he trained a generation of painters and photographers who carried his techniques forward. His invention of shashin abura-e — combining photography with oil painting — was a distinctive hybrid practice that blurred the line between mechanical reproduction and handcrafted art.

The Name in Japanese

The name is 横山松三郎.

• Kana reading: よこやま まつさぶろう
• Romaji: Yokoyama Matsusaburō

The family name comes first, as in all Japanese names. It is 横山 (Yokoyama), and the given name is 松三郎 (Matsusaburō).

Breaking down the characters:

• 横 (yoko) — "side" or "horizontal". In this name it carries the sense of "beside" or "across".
• 山 (yama) — "mountain". Together, 横山 (Yokoyama) literally means "mountain at the side" or "side mountain", a common Japanese surname.

• 松 (matsu) — "pine tree". The pine is a durable, evergreen tree and a frequent element in Japanese names.
• 三 (sabu) — "three". In this given name it is read sabu, an older or alternative reading of the numeral.
• 郎 (rō) — "son" or "young man". This character commonly ends traditional male given names.

The full given name 松三郎 (Matsusaburō) thus reads roughly as "third son of the pine", following the old Japanese convention of naming sons by birth order with a poetic or natural element attached.

Legacy

Yokoyama's photographs of Edo Castle and the Shōsōin treasures remain primary documents of Meiji-era heritage preservation. His stereographic series, though scarce today, are recognised by historians as the only notable Japanese-made stereoviews of the early Meiji period. His art school and his military academy lectures spread photographic and lithographic knowledge at a formative moment in Japanese visual technology.

His shashin abura-e technique, in which photographs were overpainted with oil, anticipated later hybrid forms of photographic art in Japan. He died in 1884, but his students and his studio's successor, Oda Nobumasa, carried on his methods. Yokoyama's career spanned the transition from the Edo period to the Meiji era, and his work helped define what photography could be in Japan.