Iwasa Matabei

Iwasa Matabei (岩佐又兵衛, 1578-1650) is one of the most consequential and disputed figures in the genealogy of ukiyo-e, an early Edo-period painter whose hanging scrolls and screens of common-life subjects are frequently cited as the genre's prehistory and, in some scholarly traditions, as the moment when ukiyo-e first crystallized as a coherent pictorial mode. Working a half-century before Hishikawa Moronobu's foundational woodblock single sheets of the 1670s, Matabei produced his floating-world imagery as painted scrolls and screens rather than as prints, but the subjects he addressed, dancers and entertainers of Kyoto, genre scenes of the new urban classes, literary heroines of medieval narrative reimagined in contemporary dress, anticipated by decades the visual world that later print masters would inherit and codify.

Matabei was born in 1578 into one of the spectacular tragedies of the late Sengoku period. He was the son of Araki Murashige, a daimyo and former retainer of Oda Nobunaga who had famously rebelled against his lord that same year and held the besieged Arioka Castle for over a year before fleeing. When the castle finally fell, Nobunaga's forces executed virtually the entire Araki household in a notorious bloodbath; Matabei survived only because a wet nurse spirited the infant away to a Honganji temple in Ishiyama, where he was raised under the family name Iwasa, his mother's surname. This childhood escape from annihilation seems to have left a lasting mark on his sensibility; scholars have noted the strain of psychological intensity and unsettling violence that runs through his most ambitious paintings.

After coming of age in Kyoto, Matabei studied painting in both the Tosa school's classical yamato-e tradition, with its delicate line, narrative subjects, and bright mineral colors, and the more austere ink idiom of the Kano school, which dominated official commissions under the Tokugawa regime. His mature work synthesizes these inheritances with the popular subject matter of Kyoto's flourishing entertainment culture, producing a distinctive style marked by full-bodied figures with broad cheeks, narrow chins, and slightly downcast eyes, what later connoisseurs called the toyokao or rich-face type. This figural manner became the visible signature of his hand and the basis for centuries of attributions and misattributions.

Matabei worked in Kyoto throughout the early seventeenth century, when the imperial capital was still the cultural center of Japan. He executed portraits of the Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals in the so-called Doon version, named for its colophon attribution, a major commission whose dispersed sheets now reside in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He painted hanging scrolls of classical literary subjects, the heroines of the Tales of Ise, the famous female poets of the Heian period, the courtier-poets of the imperial anthologies, all reimagined in his characteristic style. He also produced the genre paintings of contemporary urban entertainment for which he would later become most celebrated.