Yokoyama Matsusaburō worked across photography, photo-oil painting, lithography, and cultural heritage documentation, playing a central role in the visual record-keeping of the early Meiji state. His photographs of Edo Castle and the Jinshin Survey have been designated Important Cultural Properties of Japan.
Yokoyama Matsusaburo combined photography with oil painting, lithographic printing, and cultural-heritage survey, connecting photography to the formation of the Meiji state's visual administrative order rather than limiting it to portrait-making alone. Through his participation in the Jinshin Survey he helped pioneer the first systematic government-led effort to document shrines, temples, and cultural assets across Japan, opening a channel through which photography functioned as a foundation of national knowledge. His contributions to the Vienna World's Exposition and his experiments with photolithography embody the process by which photography became embedded in both outward self-representation and print culture. The ongoing recognition of the related photographic materials as Important Cultural Properties shows that his recording practice continues to be evaluated as one of the founding moments of Japanese photographic history.
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Yokoyama Matsusaburo was born in 1838 on Etorofu Island and studied photography in the final years of the Edo period. He is said to have learned photographic technique under Shimooka Renjo.*1 In the early Meiji period he was involved in photographing Edo Castle (later the Imperial Palace) during the transition from the shogunate to the new government, and those photographs are now among the materials held as Important Cultural Properties by the Tokyo National Museum.*2 He participated as an art photography specialist in the Jinshin Survey of 1872 — a government-led project to investigate shrines, temples, and cultural properties across the country — and made substantial contributions to cultural property documentation.*3 He was also responsible for photographing works submitted to the Vienna World Exposition (1873), connecting him to the Meiji state's external self-representation.*4 In addition to photography he worked in photo-oil painting (a technique combining oil painting with photography) and lithography, and he died in 1884.*5
Cross-media expression: photography, oil painting, and lithography
What stands out in Yokoyama Matsusaburo's practice is that he did not treat photography as a single isolated medium but worked across it in combination with oil painting, lithography, and cultural property documentation. The Edo-Tokyo Museum's description of him as "the Leonardo da Vinci of Japan" is an exaggerated tagline, but his photo-oil painting and cross-media activities do confirm that he was not a practitioner confined to one field.*6 Photo-oil painting was an experiment in adding pictorial value and color to the reproductive capacity of photography, and it shows how photography in the Meiji period was connected to "art" and "education" as well as to "documentation." A J-STAGE paper on photo-oil painting discusses the practice and its historical context in detail.*7 The Art Platform Japan artist database presents Yokoyama's activities in a cross-domain framework and shows his positioning within the contexts of domestic art, cultural property, and photographic history.*8
National surveys and cultural property documentation
More important than reading Yokoyama's work as individual artistic output is recognizing that his practice was integrated into the visual record-keeping systems of the early Meiji state. The Tokyo National Museum holds the photographs connected to the Jinshin Survey as Important Cultural Properties, indicating that the survey in which Yokoyama participated was one of the institutional starting points for cultural property documentation in Japan.*9 The museum's page on "The Jinshin Survey" explains that this investigation was one of the earliest government-organized attempts to document temples, shrines, and cultural properties systematically across the country, with photography as its central means.*10 The cultural property designation records held in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database show that materials related to Yokoyama received a fresh designation as Important Cultural Properties in 2023, confirming the high level of current evaluation.*11 The Nikko Scenic Views Photographs in the Cultural Heritage Online database can be consulted individually as photographs connected to the Jinshin Survey.*12
Multi-media practitioner
What best conveys Yokoyama's distinctive character is the item recorded by the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties concerning the discovery of his photographic plates. The rediscovery of the original plates confirmed the material evidence of his practice and expanded the foundation for research.*13 Works records published by the Tokyo Museum Collection show that the photographs he left are held in multiple institutions and remain the subject of ongoing research and exhibition.*14 The "Photographs Taken for the Austrian Vienna Exhibition" held in the DNP Image Archive can be consulted as a work that provides the concrete context of participation in the Vienna World Exposition.*15 The CiNii Research record "Yokoyama Matsusaburo and the Nikko Photographs" is a published academic research record showing that individual scholarly studies of his photographs continue.*16
Critical reception
The historical significance of Yokoyama Matsusaburo lies in prompting consideration of early Japanese photography not simply as technological adoption but in connection with the record-keeping systems, cultural property surveys, expositions, education, and printing technologies of the nation-building period. The Art Platform Japan artist information organizes his positioning within the domestic contexts of art and photographic history, and a certain degree of record also exists in international databases.*8 The Kyoto National Museum Bulletin article "The Achievements of Ninagawa Noritane and Art Photographer Yokoyama Matsusaburo" is positioned as a representative earlier study that addresses his role in the context of the Jinshin Survey in a specialist manner.*17 The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography's exhibition work list for "Early Photographic History of the Kanto Region" also positions Yokoyama as an important figure in the photographic history of the early Meiji period.*18 KAKEN research output report (19K00934) makes available the findings of a Grant-in-Aid research project that includes archival investigation related to Yokoyama Matsusaburo, indicating the context of ongoing academic research.*19