Ikeda Terukata

Ikeda Terukata (池田輝方, 1883-1921) was a Japanese painter and woodblock-print designer of the late Meiji and Taishō eras, a leading bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women) and historical-subject painter within the Tokyo nihonga circle that grew out of the studio of Mizuno Toshikata (1866-1908). Known to contemporaries equally as a Bunten salon exhibitor and as a designer of kuchi-e (frontispiece illustrations) for popular literary journals, he produced a comparatively small but consistent body of work before his early death at thirty-eight, and is most often remembered today in tandem with his wife Ikeda Shōen (1886-1917), with whom he formed one of the most closely watched artistic couples of the Taishō art world.

Born in Tokyo in 1883, Terukata entered the studio of Mizuno Toshikata as a teenager and trained alongside the cohort of pupils who would define Tokyo bijin-ga at the turn of the twentieth century. Toshikata, himself a former pupil of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), was a transitional figure between late-Edo ukiyo-e and the new nihonga of the Meiji period; he insisted that his pupils render the inward life of the sitter — "paint people, not dolls," as his often-quoted instruction had it — and grounded their drawing in close study of historical costume, kabuki deportment, and the seasonal calendar of classical waka and noh. Terukata absorbed this discipline thoroughly and was considered one of Toshikata's most accomplished male pupils, with a particular facility for the historical subjects (rekishi-ga) that nihonga painters of the late Meiji period were pressing into the formal hanging-scroll and folding-screen formats favored by the Ministry of Education exhibitions.

Within Toshikata's circle Terukata met Sakakibara Yuriko, the future Ikeda Shōen, then likewise training as a bijin-ga painter. The two married, and Terukata took up residence in the Ikeda household; from that point forward the couple shared a Tokyo studio and a single professional life. Surviving sketchbooks discovered after their deaths preserve preliminary studies in both hands for works once attributed to only one or the other, and the Ikedas were widely understood by their contemporaries to be working as a partnership rather than as independent rivals. Their joint household stood at the centre of a Tokyo bijin-ga network that also included Kaburagi Kiyokata (1878-1972), Kitano Tsunetomi, and Kikkawa Reika, painters and print designers who, through the Bunten exhibitions established in 1907 and through journals such as Bungei kurabu, defined how modern Japanese feminine beauty would be pictured for a national audience.

Terukata was a regular Bunten exhibitor from the salon's early years and won prizes at successive exhibitions. His salon submissions tended to be ambitious figural compositions — historical anecdotes drawn from the Heian and Edo literary tradition, scenes of women in seasonal pursuits, paired half-length portraits in the manner Toshikata had used for his Ministry of Education submissions of the 1890s. The Art Institute of Chicago's hanging-scroll Spring of about 1911, executed in ink, colors, and gold on silk, was conceived as the companion to Shōen's Autumn of the same date, the two scrolls forming a paired set that exemplifies the way the Ikedas worked between the formal exhibition culture of Taishō nihonga and the long tradition of paired seasonal hanging scrolls in Japanese painting. Both scrolls passed together to the Kate S. Buckingham Endowment at the Art Institute, where they remain among the most important Taishō bijin-ga in any American collection.

Alongside his Bunten paintings, Terukata produced a substantial body of kuchi-e (frontispiece illustrations) for the popular literary journals of the late Meiji and Taishō periods, including the leading bungei (literary) magazines distributed nationally by Hakubunkan and other Tokyo publishers. The kuchi-e — multi-block colour woodblock prints inserted as frontispieces into novels and short-story magazines — gave painter-illustrators of his generation a parallel commercial outlet that reached audiences far larger than the Bunten could, and a number of Terukata's frontispieces, including Hanging Poem Cards (tanzaku) from a Maple Tree of about 1903-1905 and Thinking of Hunting of about 1910 (both Honolulu Museum of Art), are now recognized as important examples of the form. He also designed a small number of independent print series in the older ukiyo-e formats, including a sheet from a Thousand Kinds of Flowers (Chigusa no Hana) cycle of 1901 held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and contributed to the Russo-Japanese War print trade with patriotic compositions such as the Dai Nihon teikoku kaigun daishōri banzai ("Long Live the Great Imperial Japanese Navy's Victory") triptych of about 1904-1905, which survives in Tokyo and American collections.

Ikeda Shōen died of tuberculosis in 1917 at thirty-one, and Terukata, deeply affected by her loss, survived her by only four years. He continued to paint and to design prints during this period — the lithograph Bijin-zu (Picture of a Beauty) of about 1912-1921, depicting a woman in a Western-style dinner setting, dates from these final years and shows his interest in the modernizing imagery of the Taishō moga (modern girl) — but he produced no major Bunten submissions on the scale of his joint work with Shōen. He died in 1921 at thirty-eight. A posthumous tribute publication, the Shin ukiyoe bijin awase (New Ukiyo-e Beauties) album of 1924, gathered woodblock reproductions of his designs in the calendar-month format that linked them to the Edo-period series tradition his teacher Toshikata had also worked in.

Within the history of Japanese painting Ikeda Terukata occupies a place that has been partly obscured by the more dramatic biography of his wife and by his own short career, but which is steadily being reassessed. He was a painter who carried Toshikata's instruction to render spirit rather than appearance into Taishō bijin-ga and historical painting; one of the leading male nihonga exhibitors of his generation in Tokyo; and a kuchi-e designer whose frontispieces helped define how the modern Japanese woman was pictured in the literary press at the moment the Bunten was establishing nihonga as a public art. Holdings at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (which preserves the joint sketchbooks of the Ikeda household) together provide the institutional spine of his reputation outside Japan.