SAKAI Hôitsu

1761-1828

Japanese

painter, printmaker, antiquarian

"Japanese painter, printmaker and antiquarian. He was the second son of Sakai Tadamochi (1735–67), lord of Harima, and the main instigator of the revival of interest in the early 19th century in the Rinpa school of decorative painting. Hōitsu created a distinctive Edo style of Rinpa out of the tradition created by Ogata Kōrin in the early 18th century by adding new subject-matter and changing the handling of detail, which became more profuse, sharper and less artificial. This new sense of naturalism was characteristic of the arts of the latter part of the Edo period (1600–1868), as was the pleasure Hōitsu took in witty contrivances. Hōitsu may also have been a pupil of Sō Shiseki, an advocate of the Nagasaki style of bird-and-flower painting, and of the academic painter Kanō Takanobu (1740–94). In 1797 Hōitsu used ill-health as a pretext for entering the priesthood at the Nishi Honganji, a temple in Kyoto; he probably did this to avoid his duties as a high-born samurai, for from about this time he began to devote much of his time to painting and to the study of the Rinpa style in particular. Hōitsu is said to have begun working in the Rinpa style on the advice of the literati painter Tani Bunchō, although he may also have known the Rinpa painter Tawaraya Sōri (fl late 18th century). By 1809 Hōitsu had settled permanently in the village of Ōtsuka in the Shitaya section of Edo (now Negishi, Taitō Ward, Tokyo), and over the next decade he made an intensive study of the work of earlier Rinpa masters, especially Kōrin. The period after 1820 is considered that of Hōitsu’s maturity. In the set of 12 hanging scrolls Birds and Flowers of the Twelve Months (1823; Tokyo, Imp. Household Col.) he combined the decorative sense of the Rinpa school with composition and brushwork inspired by the Nagasaki school of bird-and-flower painting. Other, undated works include the artist’s great masterpiece, Summer and Autumn Grasses (Tokyo, N. Mus.). An example of the witty sentiments beloved of 19th-century Edo, it is painted on the back of Kōrin’s Wind and Thunder Gods so that the summer grasses seem to be bending in a storm sent by the Thunder God on the obverse, while the autumn grasses appear to be blown about by the Wind God. In both screens the background is silver foil instead of the more usual gold. In 1823 Hōitsu learnt that the grave of Kōrin’s younger brother, Ogata Kenzan, was at the Zenyōji, a temple in the neighbouring village of Sakamoto and, together with another admirer of Kenzan, the textile merchant Ōsawa Nagayuki (1769–1844), he had a commemorative stele erected at the temple. In the same year he issued his notes on Kenzan as a woodblock-printed book, the Kenzan iboku (‘Surviving works of Kenzan’), and in 1826 he issued a sequel to the Kōrin hyakuzu. Hōitsu’s researches into the life and work of Kōrin and other Rinpa masters made him the centre of a wide circle of Rinpa connoisseurs, and his many pupils included Suzuki Reitan (1792–1817), a retainer of the Sakai family who became a painter. Hōitsu’s most important follower was Suzuki kiitsu, who worked with him from 1813 and who was adopted into Reitan’s family. Although Hōitsu’s work is overshadowed by that of the four other great masters of Rinpa (Hon’ami Kōetsu, Tawaraya Sōtatsu and the Ogata brothers Kōrin and Kenzan), it was his style that was passed down to modern Japan and given new life during the revival of native painting styles led by Tenshin [Kakuzō] Okakura (1862–1913) and his students." --Oxford Art Online

Japanese Ink-Painting and Calligraphy:1400-1957 A.D. subject

Japanese Ink-Painting and Calligraphy:1400-1957 A.D. subject