Background
Matsusaburo Yokoyama was born Yokoyama Bunroku (横山 文六) in Iturup (then under Japanese control) on 10 October 1838.
松三郎 横山
Matsusaburo Yokoyama was born Yokoyama Bunroku (横山 文六) in Iturup (then under Japanese control) on 10 October 1838.
Early in his life, Matsusaburo Yokoyama and his family moved to Hakodate, where in 1854 he was first exposed to photography on seeing daguerreotypes by Eliphalet Brown, Jr. and A. F. Mozhaiskii.
At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to a kimono dealer, and during this time developed an interest in painting. A few years later, as an assistant to the Russian painter Lehman, Matsusaburo Yokoyama was exposed to Western painting styles and helped sketch the surroundings of the Russian Consulate in Hakodate. With a view to improving his landscape painting, he started to learn photography. He travelled to Yokohama and studied photography under Shimooka Renjō, then returned to Hakodate and studied under the Russian consul, I. A. Goshkevich.
In 1868 Matsusaburo Yokoyama opened his own commercial photographic studio in Yokohama. That same year he moved his studio to Ryogoku (in Tokyo), naming it Tsuten-ro (通天楼); some time later, he moved Tsuten-ro a short distance to Ueno Ikenohata).
In 1868, he met Ninagawa Noritane, an official in the Meiji government, who commissioned him to photograph Edo Castle, before its imminent reconstruction, and the Imperial treasures housed in the Shōsōin. The project was completed between 1871 and 1872 and some of the resulting work was published in 1872 as an album of 64 photographs titled Kyū-Edo-jo Shashin-cho (Photograph Album of the former Edo Castle) and republished as an album of 73 photographs in 1878 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.
In 1870, Shimooka Renjo invited Yokoyama to join him in photographing Mount Nikko-Shirane. The resulting photographs, under both their names, were subsequently presented to the Tokugawa clan.
Matsusaburo Yokoyama opened an art school in 1873 whose students included such painters as Kamei Shiichi, Kamei Takejiro and Yamada Nariaki, and such photographers as 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, lecturing on photography and lithography.
In 1881, a recurrence of his tuberculosis, first caught around the age of fifteen, forced him to leave his post at the Military Academy. Nevertheless, he then founded the Shashin Sekiban-sha (Photolithography Company), he continued to paint, and about this time he created what he called shashin abura-e or "photographic oil-paintings", in which the paper support of a photograph was cut away and oil paints then applied to the remaining emulsion. Yokoyama produced a number of works using this technique.
Matsusaburo Yokoyama died in Tokyo on 15 October 1884.
Matsusaburo Yokoyama was the first Japanese photographer to seriously pursue stereographic photography. An early photograph of his studio equipment shows seven cameras, of which two are stereographic.
In addition to his landscapes and portraits, Yokoyama is noted for his self-portraits, and his works include paintings, large format albumen prints (monochrome and hand-coloured), and shashin abura-e. He produced studio souvenir albums, some of which have survived to this day.
