Ohno Bakufu

Ohno Bakufu (大野麦風, 1888–1976) was a Japanese artist who created one of the most ambitious and celebrated natural history print series of the twentieth century: "Dai Nihon Gyorui Gashu" (A Collection of Fish of Great Japan), a monumental work depicting the fish of Japan with scientific precision and artistic beauty. This extraordinary series, published between 1937 and 1942, established Ohno as the foremost ichthyological artist in the Japanese woodblock print tradition and secured his enduring reputation among collectors of both fine art and natural history prints.

Born in 1888 in Tokyo, Ohno trained as a painter in the Western (yōga) style and developed a particular fascination with marine life that would define his artistic career. After the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 he relocated to the Kansai region, where his celebrated fish prints would later take shape. Japan's island geography and its deep cultural relationship with the sea provided Ohno with an inexhaustible subject — the extraordinary diversity of fish, shellfish, and marine creatures that populated Japanese waters and Japanese cuisine, ritual, and visual culture.

The "Great Japanese Fish" series is Ohno's masterwork and one of the most remarkable achievements in shin-hanga publishing. Comprising seventy-two prints issued in installments between 1937 and 1942, the series depicts fish species found in Japanese waters with a combination of scientific accuracy and artistic sensibility that places it in the tradition of great natural history illustration while maintaining the distinctive qualities of the Japanese woodblock medium. Each print portrays one or several fish species in their natural environment — swimming in open water, hovering near coral, navigating kelp forests, or resting on the sea floor — rendered with meticulous attention to anatomical detail, coloring, and behavior.

The technical quality of the prints is exceptional. The fish are rendered with multiple layers of color printing that capture the iridescence of scales, the translucency of fins, and the subtle color variations that distinguish species. Water is suggested through graduated blue washes and subtle wave patterns, while the natural settings — coral, seaweed, rocks, sandy bottoms — are depicted with careful observation. The printing required extraordinary skill from the artisan team, as the naturalistic effects demanded precise registration and sophisticated color gradation across numerous printing blocks.

Beyond the fish series, Ohno produced prints of other subjects, including landscapes, though these are far less well known than his marine works. He also created paintings and illustrations throughout his career; he exhibited oil paintings and belonged to the Western-style painting society Taiheiyō Gakai (the Pacific Painting Society). He lived to the age of eighty-eight, one of the longer-lived shin-hanga artists, and continued working well into the postwar period.

Ohno Bakufu's legacy rests primarily on the "Great Japanese Fish" series, which occupies a unique position at the intersection of fine art printmaking and natural history illustration. The series is prized by collectors of Japanese prints, natural history art, and fishing enthusiasts alike. His works are held in public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.