Nakagawa Isaku

Nakagawa Isaku (中川伊作, 1899-2000) was a Japanese printmaker, painter, and antique dealer associated with the creative-print (sōsaku-hanga) movement in Kyoto. Born in Kyoto in 1899, he trained at the Kyoto City School of Fine Arts and Crafts, graduating in 1918 as a pupil of the Nihonga painter Kikuchi Keigetsu, and went on to complete the Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting in 1921. He later took up woodblock printmaking under Hiratsuka Un'ichi, a leading figure of the creative-print movement.

Nakagawa was closely involved in the organisational life of Kyoto printmaking. In the mid-1920s he joined with three other artists to form a creative-print distribution club, and in 1929 he was among the founders of the Kyoto Creative Print Society. From 1932 he was a member of the Japan Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyōkai). His prints of women from the 1930s are admired for the naturalism of their gestures and for the detailed rendering of textile patterns, and his wider output also included fish, landscapes, and portraits.

Alongside his art he worked from the mid-1920s as a dealer in antiques, becoming president of an Oriental antique art study group in 1936, and he pursued interests in folk craft and pottery. In his later career he taught abroad: from 1960 he served as a visiting professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, lecturing on Asian painting and modern prints, and by the mid-1960s he was also lecturing at the Rudolf Schaeffer School of Design and at several California institutions, work for which the city of San Francisco recognised him in 1964. He moved to Okinawa in 1972 and remained there for the rest of his life, dying in 2000.