Itō Jakuchū

Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800) was one of the most idiosyncratic and technically inventive artists of mid-Edo Kyoto, an Edo eccentric whose obsessive observation of the natural world and willingness to invent his own techniques placed him outside every established school of the period. Though celebrated above all as a Kyoto painter, particularly for the monumental Doshoku Sai-e (Colorful Realm of Living Beings), Jakuchu also worked decisively in printed form, producing some of the most unusual and technically experimental prints of the eighteenth century. The afterlife of his designs in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century reproductive woodblock prints further extended his reach to the Western collectors and museum audiences who encounter his work today.

Jakuchu was born Ito Genshuku in 1716 in the Nishiki-koji district of Kyoto, the eldest son of a prosperous greengrocer family that ran the long-established wholesale produce business known as the Masu-ya. As the heir, he assumed leadership of the business after his father's death when he was twenty-three, and for the next two decades managed the shop while pursuing painting on the side. The Nishiki-koji market remains a working food street to this day, and Jakuchu's intimate boyhood familiarity with the daily traffic of vegetables, fish, fowl, and live birds in the family stalls is reflected throughout his mature work, which returns again and again to chickens, fish, and seasonal produce with an almost devotional attentiveness to living forms. In 1755, at the age of forty, he entrusted the family business to his younger brother and retired from commerce to devote himself entirely to painting.

A devout Buddhist with close ties to the Obaku Zen monastery Shokoku-ji and its prior Daiten Kenjo, who became his lifelong patron, Jakuchu approached painting and printmaking as forms of religious practice. His art name Jakuchu, granted by Daiten, derives from a Daoist phrase meaning, roughly, like the great emptiness. The mature paintings of his middle and late career, including the Doshoku Sai-e thirty-scroll set donated to Shokoku-ji, demonstrate a singular fusion of meticulous naturalistic observation, derived from his own keeping of chickens in his garden for study, with an almost mystical attention to the patterns, colors, and structures of plants and animals.

Jakuchu's contribution to printed art was as inventive as his painting. He worked extensively in takuhanga, a stone-rubbing or reverse-printing technique adapted from Chinese practice, in which the image was carved in negative and impressed onto paper to produce a distinctive white-on-black aesthetic that contrasts sharply with the standard polychrome relief printing of mainstream ukiyo-e. His most ambitious takuhanga project, Soken sekisatsu (Carving Pines, Engraving Stones), brought a sensibility derived from rubbings of Buddhist steles into the medium of the printed book, producing pages whose ghostly, inverted tonal logic remains unlike anything else in Edo printmaking. He retired in old age to the village of Sekihoji near Fukakusa in southeastern Kyoto, where he continued painting until his death in 1800 at age eighty-four.

Jakuchu's reputation faded in the nineteenth century but accelerated through the twentieth, particularly after Meiji-era Tokyo publishers produced color woodblock prints based on his bird-and-flower paintings around 1900. These reproductions, including A White Macaw, Red Parrot on the Branch of a Tree, Golden Pheasant in the Snow, Swallow and Camellia, and The Paroquet at the Metropolitan Museum, brought his idiosyncratic vision to international audiences. Today, original eighteenth-century works such as the rare ishizuri-e Rooster at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the woodblock-printed Jakuchu Picture Album and Happy Improvisations on a Riverboat Journey at the Met sit alongside the early twentieth-century reproductive prints in major museum collections, documenting both Jakuchu's eighteenth-century innovations and his enduring appeal across centuries.