Biography
Kiyohara Tamayo was the second daughter of Kiyohara Einosuke, manager of the famous Zōjō-ji temple in Shiba-Shinbori, Minato, Tokyo, Japan. She started studying seriously painting with a Japanese master even before entering elementary school. Her life suddenly changed when Sicilian sculptor Vincenzo Ragusa, for whom she had modeled when she was just 17, after spending six years in Japan as a sculpture professor decided to go home in 1882 bringing with him Kiyohara Einosuke, his wife and 21-year-old Tamayo.
In Palermo Ragusa opened the Scuola Superiore d'Arte Applicata, employing Kiyohara and his wife as instructors to introduce Japanese lacquer techniques to Italy, but difficulties in obtaining the necessary raw materials caused the school's closure, and Kiyohara and his wife returned to Japan after six years in Palermo. They left behind their daughter Tamayo, who married Ragusa in 1889 and adopted the Italian name of Eleonora Ragusa.
She continued to be active in the arts and was nominated vice-principal of an art school Vincenzo opened in Palermo. The school, called “Museo Artistico Industriale, Scuole Officine”, was opened in 1884 with public funds in Palazzo Belvedere (Casa Benzo). He headed the male section, she the female section. The school still exists under the name of Istituto d'Arte di Palermo.
After her husband's death in 1927, two Japanese newspapers, the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun and the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, found out about her story and published a serialized novel about it, bringing Tamayo to fame in her homeland. By then she could barely speak Japanese anymore, but she decided to go back. After her return, she opened an atelier in Shiba Shinbori, where she died some years later. She is buried at her family temple, Chōgen-ji. Kiyohara was herself a painter of great skill, but most of the works she left in Japan were destroyed during WWII, while those left in Italy are still exhibited in various private collections.
According to her wishes, half of her ashes are in Japan, half lie in Palermo next to her husband's grave.
Read more about this topic: Kiyohara Tama
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)