Artists

Ishida Yūtei 石田幽汀 (1721 - 1786)

Ishida Yūtei is an interesting figure. He is technically speaking a Kanō painter. He is trained in a Kanō lineage associated with Tan’yū but he is based in Kyoto. There, Ishida Yūtei develops a decorative style of Kanō painting which would later inform the work of his most famous disciple Maruyama Ōkyo. The Crane screens are a signature subject of Yūtei. They are on gold ground but there is a remarkable all-overness to his distribution of the cranes on this ground. They have a certain quiet dignity to them. There is a lot of commotion, they’re in very different poses, different states of activity, they are interacting with each other and the space around them in different ways. They reward a close looking and really establish a balance between traditional and the naturalistic painting that will become a hallmark of Ōkyo’s work.

Itō Jakuchū 伊藤若冲 (1716 - 1800)

Itō Jakuchū emerges during the mid-18th century as part of a group of painters who are unbeholden to any artistic school or lineage. He is a green grocer which in his case means that he owns land in one of the most important vegetable markets and lends them out to farmers. He’s very much a part of the urban commoner culture of Kyoto. He is also a devout Zen practitioner and he develops a style of painting closely associated with his Zen practice and ferocious habit of observing nature and trying to capture its inner vitality. He retires from his family business at age 40 and devotes himself to painting. He is not painting for commission or profit but he is painting as a kind of passionate and religious pursuit and in the process, he makes some of the most unforgettable polychrome bird and flower paintings ever witnessed in East Asian history.

Kaihō Yūsetsu 海北友雪 (1598-1677)

A painter in the Kaihō school that was founded by his father Kaihō Yūshō, Yūsetsu descended from a military family and first lived in Kyoto, moving later to Edo. After his father’s death, he operated a shop that produced ready-made and made-to-order items. He returned to painting later after being introduced to the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu (1605-1651) and coming into contact with Kano school painters. He eventually received commissions from courtiers and the shogun himself. His painting of a dragon in varying tones of ink is a typical subject of Kano painters. Ink is considered a color in this tradition, and this painting is a good example of how the various washes of ink convey the sense of clouds and mist. Also notable and more specific to the Kaihō school is the predominance of washes rather than lines in the depiction.

Kanō Sansetsu 狩野山雪 (1589-1651)

Kanō Sansetsu is one of the most interesting painters of the Kanō School, a school of painters who are official painters to the Tokugawa Shogunate with many branches in urban centers throughout Japan. Sansetsu was a member of the Kyoto branch where he worked for local temples, interacted with local aristocratic families and developed a very personalized, erudite form of painting based on being as faithful as possible to the Chinese classics as he saw them.

And what’s interesting is that in trying to be very orthodox, Sansetsu ends up becoming very mannerist and idiosyncratic. He develops a style of painting that is so true, in his formulation, to classical treatments of painting subjects that they become customized to his own idiosyncratic ways of looking at the world. His compositions are immediately identifiable in that they are very much his own.

Kanō Shigenobu 狩野重信(Unknown - Early 17th Century)

Kanō Shigenobu demonstrates the way in which the Kanō studio system provided compositional ideas and habits of representation that would endure throughout the Edo period. He transmits the kind of bravura, the large-scale painting style of Kanō painting during the early Momoyama period when they are starting to ornament the pictorial program of castles, and large-scale buildings. Shigenobu’s wonderful work in the Seattle Art Museum demonstrates the scale and dynamism of design of this era. The asymmetry the abundant use of unpainted space, also the materiality of the metallic gold foil surface to have an effect on the viewer, the counterintuitive pairing of two different plant forms on the surface, all of these things are wonderful aspects of the screen that really reflect the dynamism of large scale painting in Japan right at the transition into the early modern period.

Kishi Ganku 岸岸駒 (1749/56-1838)

Although born in Kanazawa, Kishi Ganku traveled to Kyoto in 1773 and became a retainer of Prince Arisugawa. In 1804, he entered the imperial court and was given the position of honorary governor of Echizen. Thus, Ganku was a retainer of the imperial court as well as a technically skilled painter. Like many of his generation, he first studied Kano school painting. He then worked in the style of Shen Nan-p’in; this is a style developed by a Chinese painter in Nagasaki that emphasizes an accurate rendering of birds and flowers in bright colors. Ganku then came under the influence of the Maruyama-Shijō school, a style that included a focus on working from life. Ganku specialized in paintings of animals, especially tigers. However, as tigers were not native to Japan, it is likely that Ganku learned about tigers from tiger skins and images in paintings by others. The tiger in the folding screen is painted in Ganku’s typical rough brushwork with special emphasis on the details of the coat.

Kuroda Tōkō 黒田稲皐 (1785-1846)

Tōkō is known as a scholar-literati (Jpnse: Nanga) painter. He was of samurai rank from the Tottori clan, but was later adopted by the Kuroda clan. This type of adoption was common in Japan as a means to carry on a family name or continue a workshop of painters (or other artists). Tōkō was known for his abilities with martial arts as well as for his lifelike paintings of carp, as seen in this painting from the early 1800s.

Maruyama Ōkyo 円山応挙 (1733 - 1795)

Maruyama Ōkyo was the most popular painter of the late 18th century. He made paintings more accessible for an expanding pictorial culture of the period at the time many more Japanese were commissioning and owning works. Ōkyo is closely associated with the concept of realism, shasei, painting directly from nature. Now that is an old concept, and one of the interesting things about Ōkyo’s relationship to shasei is that he was very interested in studying classical Chinese painters of the academy who practiced a kind of magic realism, where they attempted to replicate the surface forms of a motif with such exactitude that they end up also conveying a kind of inner life as well. That’s one of the goals of shasei. But he isn’t straightforwardly depicting works according to some kind of memetic illusionism in his final paintings. He is still maintaining the wonderful decorative quality but selectively incorporating aspects of this new tendency into this work and that’s where the genius of Ōkyo lies is he knows in what balance to introduce the new and combine it with the old in his works.

Mori Sōsen 森狙仙 (1747 - 1821)

Mori Sōsen emerges in the wake of Ōkyo’s popularity in the Kyoto or Kansai region. You might say Sōsen strategically turns himself into a monkey painter. What he is really masterful at is the virtuosic rendering of fur, of animal pelts. Sōsen follows this tradition but masters it to an unrivaled extent. He becomes so closely associated with monkey painting that he actually changes a character of his name on his 60th birthday to mean “monkey” instead of “ancestor.” He is literally the monkey painter in Japan. Sōsen is associated with the Maruyama or the Maruyama Shijō School. What he does is imbue a sense of wonderful personality into his monkeys.

Nagasawa Rosetsu 長沢芦雪 (1754 - 1799)

Nagasawa Rosetsu is a virtuosic painter who follows in the footsteps of Ōkyo but really expands upon Ōkyo’s masterful innovations and experimentation in the selective use of new kinds of pictorialism, especially in ink painting techniques. Rosetsu among other things is a masterful ink painter who uses linear and planer effects, the magic of water solubility in ink, to evoke new effects in painting. 

Rosetsu was of low-ranking samurai status who had served feudal lords in the regions outside of Kyoto before entering Maruyama Ōkyo’s studio. His personality and way of painting put himself outside of the established workshop system and he soon became an independent painter. By 1782, he was recognized in a Who’s Who in Kyoto as one of the best painters of the city. He was extremely versatile, and is known for his interest in scientific perspective, the boneless style of painting (mokkotsu), and a playfulness that is one of the hallmarks of the visual arts of the later Edo period.

Ogata Kenzan 尾形乾山 (1663-1743)

Both Kenzan and his older brother Kōrin came from a family of wealthy and cultured cloth merchants. Kenzan was a calligrapher, tea master, potter and painter, melding these arts together. Because he produced pottery to his own taste and brushed his signature on the underside of his pots, he became known as Japan’s first “artist potter” at a time when most ceramic production was done by anonymous artisans. He relied more on molded rather hand-thrown pottery, using ceramics as a base for interesting and creative decoration. He also fit into the tradition of cultivated recluses in Kyoto. Kenzan built a retreat he called the “Hall of Learning Tranquility” in northwest Kyoto, where he could read, write, and paint in an atmosphere of quiet reflection.

Ogata Kōrin 尾形光琳 (1658 - 1716)

Ogata Kōrin is a painter associated with Kyoto’s urban commoner class. He was the scion of a famous draper shop which serviced the Kyoto elite with kimono robes. After Kōrin’s father dies, Kōrin and his brother, Kenzan, inherit a small fortune but Kōrin the dandy, the profligate son that he is, squanders that fortune away and soon he has to make a living, and eventually things become so dire that he has to take up painting. He doesn’t go through a long apprenticeship in a professional studio at least we don’t believe he does. What he ends up doing is transposing the artistic and design ideas from other media in Japan into the surface of painting so that they become somewhere between pattern and picture. What Kōrin demonstrates through the dynamism of what results is that Japanese painting can be a very intermedia art form in which ideas from other media other surfaces, textiles, lacquerware and so forth are informing and enriching the painting traditions themselves. 

 In Red and White Plums Blossoms you have a classic example of Kōrin’s design genius at work There is so much that is wonderfully visual and yet departs from tradition in that work. He has an extremely stylized body of water situated in the middle of the composition which possibly emerges from textile patterns. It’s very textilic in its compositional logic and in fact later on Kōrin will be associated with many textile pattern books in which you would see similarly stylized flowing water but it is as if the warp and the weft of loom is stretching sideways to create this wonderful lateral stylized movement. But here it’s transposed into the formal vocabulary of painting and using wonderfully metallic, polychrome pigments to create essentially a pictorial design in painting. 

Sakai Hōitsu 酒井抱一 (1761 - 1828)

Sakai Hōitsu is a member of the warrior status group who is born in Edo and becomes a highly accomplished painter. He cycles through a number of different painting styles before he discovers the work of Ogata Kōrin and becomes closely affiliated with Kōrin’s artistic style. In fact, you might say that Hōitsu to some extent was the inventor of Rinpa, which literally means “school of Kōrin” because he turns Kōrin into a real painting school, into a real painting lineage. Hōitsu brings to Kōrin’s style the sensibility of a Haiku poet. Hōitsu was a very accomplished haiku poet and haiku involved very fine tuned observation of daily life in the world around one. So he embeds the sensibility of the moment, the emotional tenor of the seasonal and climactic conditions of a certain environment into his painting and really, in that way innovates upon Kōrin’s Rinpa style. 

Sesson Shūkei 雪村周継 (1504 - 1589)

Sesson Shūkei is a remarkably interesting Zen monk painter. We know very little about him, we don’t even know the life dates. He wandered across North Eastern Japan during the 16th century, during an era in which the entire country was plunged into war. He moved from the patronage of one warlord to another. Interestingly, he never made it to Kyoto which was the artistic center of Japan at the time. But by virtue of his having never been to Kyoto, he developed a very quirky and personalized vocabulary of ink painting, which makes him one of the most interesting painters of the period. Dragon and Tiger is one of the great Japanese screens in an American collection. It pits two zoological representations of cosmological forces against each other. The ink work out of which the dragon emerges is remarkable, but when you look at the dragon screen he embeds a human face on the dragon, both humorous and somehow mythological at the same time. 

Shibata Zeshin 柴田是真 (1807 - 1891)

Shibata Zeshin is an interesting case of a figure who was both a painter and a lacquer maker during the transition from the Edo period to the Meiji period in Japan. He is trained in the Maruyama Shijō School but eventually also becomes a very accomplished lacquer maker. One of the interesting things about Zeshin is that he becomes very popular abroad. He is one of the most well-known Japanese artists ranking alongside Hokusai, Hiroshige, and others in France.

Zeshin was apprenticed to a lacquer craftsman as a child, and became a well-known print designer, lacquerer and painter in the style of the Maruyama-Shijō school. He was born and lived in Edo, and during the latter half of the 19th century became a member of the new art organization Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai. He also served on the Art Committee of the Imperial Household. Zeshin was among a handful of well-known living artists whose works were collected by Westerners during their lifetime in the late 19th century, a list that includes Kikuchi Yōsai (1788-1878), Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831-1889), and Watanabe Seitei (1851-1918).

Soga Shōhaku 曾我蕭白(1730 - 1800)

Soga Shōhaku has left many remarkable works that are so personalized that they are immediately recognizable as by him. We know that he was born in Kyoto but loses his parents very early and he relocates and appears to spend some time apprenticing to painters in the Ōmi region in the provinces. He seems to have developed quite a remarkable following and you might say that he is made in the periphery and moves back later to Kyoto to establish his own studio and to continue to expand upon his repertoire. Shōhaku is active when artists who are unaffiliated with traditional lineages and studios are emerging in Japan. This is an important moment, when painters such as Itō Jakuchū and Soga Shōhaku emerge who we would later call individualists. They are unbeholden to the painting models that are passed on within traditional Japanese studios so there is more freedom to innovate.

Soga Nichokuan 曾我二直庵 (First half of 17th century)

Nichokuan lived in Sakai, in what is now Osaka Prefecture, and was the son of a well-known painter Soga Chokuan (fl. 1596-1610). Both he and his father specialized in the painting of falcons. Like the painting of a dragon by Kaihō Yūsetsu, Nichokuan emphasizes the colors of ink in dripping washes, and de-emphasizes the linear quality that would be common to an academic Kano style painting.

Studio of Tawaraya Sōtatsu 宗達派 (I’nen Seal)

Tawaraya Sōtatsu 俵屋宗達 (d. 1643)

Tawarya Sōtatsu is in many ways a mystery, we know very little about his life. All we know is that he was the head of a painting shop or eya in Kyoto in the early 17th century. He initially painted primarily for urban commoners and the merchant class. But he was such a popular painter, his dynamism of composition, his design acumen, his use of abstract forms and materials was so remarkable that he came to the attention of the imperial court and he was an imperial painter who by the end of his life produced some of the most memorable screens that we have from the Edo period. 

Like Kōetsu, he was an important figure of the early Edo period, drawing inspiration from classical painting and calligraphy to which Kōetsu, in particular, had access through religious affiliations and court patrons. Collaborations with Kōetsu began with woodblock printed book designs and calligraphy which were published in limited editions of prose and poetry, Noh drama texts, and Chinese historical and literary works. All this contributed to the rising level of literacy and hunger for books in the Edo period. Sōtatsu began his career as a fan painter in the Tawaraya shop in Kyoto, and became so well-known for his creative designs that “Tawaraya” as a word came to mean fine Kyoto fans.

Tawaraya Sōtatsu & Hon'ami Kōetsu 俵屋宗達&本阿見光悦 (1558 - 1637)

One of the most important bodies of work left by Sōtatsu involve a group of scrolls he collaborated on with the calligrapher Hon’ami Kōetsu. Kōetsu at the time was one of the most dynamic cultural figures of the period involved in many different art forms and an accomplished calligrapher. Sōtatsu developed his painting style to some extent in concert with this dynamic calligraphy. He developed patterns of picture-making which dynamically led the eye leftward as these scrolls unfurled and followed Kōetsu’s calligraphy often of poetic excerpts from the Japanese tradition. And these underdrawings were in gold and silver pigment. They tended to repeat single motifs but placed them in such dynamic ways and promulgate their forward movement with such innovation that they became the kind of perfect artistic compliments to Kōetsu’s calligraphy.

 A wonderful example of this is the Poem Scroll with Deer in the Seattle Art Museum. There is a prominent excerpt from the scroll there in which you see the single motif of the deer repeated in free hand form in gold and silver paint traversing the surface. Being cropped in areas, gathering together, craning their necks upwards in all kinds of dynamic variation. It’s as if the form themselves are somehow calligraphic and imbued with the kind of personhood or characterology that we associate with East Asian calligraphy. It is truly a remarkable work.

Tawaraya Sōtatsu & Karasumaru Mitsuhiro 俵屋宗達 & 烏丸光広 (1579-1638)

It wasn’t uncommon for Japanese to cultivate the arts in addition to their primary occupation. Mitsuhiro is a good example of this practice. Born in Kyoto to nobility, he served three Tokugawa shoguns as a diplomat between the Kyoto imperial court and the Tokugawa government in Edo. Mitsuhiro was a painter and calligrapher, a poet, and a tea practitioner. The collaboration with Sōtatsu in the hanging scrolls of bulls demonstrates the connections between the royalty and esteemed commoners that was occurring during this period. The sharing of cultural knowledge between these groups and the use of the court tradition of poetry, calligraphy and painting by Kyoto artists resulted in a shared legacy among the residents of Kyoto.

Tosa Mitsuoki 土佐光起 (1617-1691)

The Tosa was a hereditary school of painters who had served both the military rulers and the imperial court for several centuries prior to the Edo period. These artists were considered the leading practitioners of Yamatoe (“pictures of Japan”), and were most closely allied with the imperial court. They were specialists of the rendering of courtly classics in both handscroll and album forms, particularly the novel The Tale of Genji. Mitsuoki re-energized the school by integrating Kano brushwork and Chinese style realistic sketches into Tosa paintings. He was particularly known for paintings of quails. In Blooming Cherry Trees at Yoshino, Mitsuoki and his studio employ the use of gold to render stylized clouds—a common Tosa element—with a truer to life depiction of the leaves, blossoms and branches of Japanese cherry trees. The scene is emblematic of the ephemeral nature of life, as Japanese cherries bloom in great profusion for a very short time in mid-spring and then drop their petals like snow onto the ground.

Watanabe Shikō 渡辺始興 (1683-1755)

Shiko was a Kyoto painter who began as a masterless samurai and then became a retainer of the royal Konoe family, serving Prince Iehiro. He blended the Kano style with the Rinpa style of Kōrin and Kenzan, and collaborated with Kenzan on pottery designs. He particularly applied the Rinpa style to paintings of birds and flowers. The Japanese iris, iris ensata, blooms in summer and is often planted in profusion in water or near the water’s edge. In the Irises folding screens, gold stands for the water of a large planting of these iris, forcing, as so often is the case in Japanese art, the viewer to call upon their imagination to see the gold as water and decorative design simultaneously.

Yosa Buson 与謝蕪村 (1716-1783)

Yosa Buson is a poet and painter who in his paintings captures the sensibility of a haikai poet embedded in what we call literati painting. So there are eternal literati landscapes that somehow are more sensual, more attuned to the temporal conditions of the day. The mist after a rain has just let up, the lighting of the early morning or late evening, the emerging autumn foliage in the fall season, all of these are characteristics of Buson’s painting.

Buson was born in Settsu and his father was most likely a rich farmer. An openly professional painter in the scholar-literati style, Buson is an example of the way that self-cultivation in the arts cut across class lines in the Edo period. As a poet, he is considered next to the 17th century master of haiku, Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694).

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European Artists

The Gutai Collective

Joe Goode