Katsushika Isai

Katsushika Isai (1821-1880) was a late-Edo and early Meiji ukiyo-e designer and illustrated-book artist of the Katsushika school, best known today as the author of the woodblock-printed drawing manuals Banbutsu zukai Isai gashiki (Universal Illustrations: Isai's Drawing Method, 1864) and Kachō sansui saiga zushiki (Detailed Sketches for Drawings of Birds and Flowers and Landscapes, 1865). A direct pupil of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) in the master's last years, Isai inherited and extended the encyclopedic graphic culture associated with Hokusai's own Manga, producing reference albums and pattern books that supplied designs for painters, craftsmen, and decorators well into the Meiji period.

Isai was born in Edo in 1821, the closing decade of the Bunsei era. Little is recorded of his family or early training apart from his entry into the studio of Hokusai, who by the 1830s was producing his late masterworks (the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, the Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, and the later Manga volumes) and whose household had become a kind of teaching workshop for a generation of pupils including Hokuei, Hokuun, Hokuju, Hokukei, and Hokumei. Isai studied under Hokusai during the 1830s and 1840s, taking the gō Isai (為斎) and signing variously Katsushika Isai or Shōtei Isai. He absorbed the encyclopedic ambition of the master's printed-book practice — the conviction that the world's birds, fish, plants, tools, costumes, gestures, and landscapes could be captured in compact graphic notation suitable for woodblock reproduction — and made it the foundation of his own career.

Isai's most consequential works belong to the genre of edehon (drawing manuals) and zushiki (design albums): woodblock-printed books that served both as catalogs of motifs and as instructional models for younger artists and craftsmen. The Banbutsu zukai Isai gashiki, published in Edo in 1864 (Genji 1) by Yamatoya Kihē and others in two volumes, gathers hundreds of small sketches across every category of subject matter — figures, animals, plants, landscapes, tools, vessels, costume details, and decorative ornament — laid out for easy reference. The slightly later Kachō sansui saiga zushiki (1865, Keiō 1), and the related Wachō sansui saiga zushiki (1866), narrow the focus to birds and flowers (kachō) and landscapes (sansui), the two central genres of Edo-period painting outside the figural tradition. These books circulated widely among professional and amateur artists, were reissued through the Meiji period, and reached Western collections in the great waves of Japanese book exports that followed the 1862 London International Exhibition and the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle.

Alongside the drawing manuals, Isai continued to produce paintings and single-sheet prints throughout his career. Surviving works include fan paintings on silk and paper — the format used in his Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter farming scenes and his summer-flower studies, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2000.210, 2001.561.1-.2) — and contributions to collaborative prints in series such as Edo no hana meishō-e (Flowers of Edo and Views of Famous Places), where his work appeared alongside Utagawa Kunisada I and other contemporaries. He also signed occasional surimono and book illustrations under the Hokusai-school manner he had been taught.