Age of Revolution
Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800)
Japanese Edo Painting Schools painter.
Itō Jakuchū was born in Kyoto as the eldest son of the Masuya, a wholesale greengrocery at the Nishiki market, and for decades he ran that family business. Only in his forties did he hand it to a younger brother and give himself wholly to painting. Largely self-taught from Chinese models and from relentless observation of living things — he is said to have kept domestic fowl in his garden simply to study them — he became the most singular of Kyoto's eccentric painters, admired in his own day and celebrated again in the modern era for the strangeness and precision of his vision.
A devout lay Buddhist, Jakuchū was close to the Zen priest Daiten of the great Shōkoku-ji monastery, who gave him the art-name Jakuchū, a phrase carrying the sense that fullness may appear as emptiness. His supreme achievement is the 'Colorful Realm of Living Beings' (Dōshoku sai-e), a set of thirty hanging scrolls of birds, fish, insects, and flowers painted over roughly a decade in dense mineral colour on silk — often coloured from behind as well as in front — which he dedicated to Shōkoku-ji as a religious offering; the set later entered the Imperial collection.
Alongside this jewel-like realism Jakuchū pursued radical experiment: the 'Birds and Animals in the Flower Garden' screens are built from tens of thousands of tiny painted squares, a mosaic-like grid anticipating the look of pixels by two centuries, and his monochrome ink works range from a plump white elephant to a comically stylised menagerie. He worked into old age in Kyoto, and by the late twentieth century his once-marginal art had become one of the most beloved in all of Japanese painting.
The words the record keeps using: meticulous, eccentric, exuberant, devout, observant, playful, singular.
At a glance
- Lived 1716–1800
- Origin Japanese
- Worked in Kyoto
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Edo Painting Schools
- Mediums Ink on silk, Ink on paper, Ink, color, and gold on folding screen
- Techniques Ink wash (broken ink)
Works in the archive
- Rooster and Hen with Hydrangeas (from Colorful Realm of Living Beings), 1759 (From the Dōshoku sai-e, Museum of the Imperial Collections (Sannomaru Shōzōkan), Tokyo)
One of the celebrated rooster scrolls: a magnificent cockerel and hen among flowering hydrangeas, every feather, comb, and petal rendered with almost hallucinatory precision. It shows why Jakuchū kept live fowl to study… - Golden Pheasant in Snow (Setchū Kinkei-zu), 1761 (From the Dōshoku sai-e, Museum of the Imperial Collections (Sannomaru Shōzōkan), Tokyo)
A golden pheasant perches on a snow-laden branch, its fiery plumage blazing against white snow and dark ground. The scroll pairs the warmth of the living bird with the cold silence of winter, a favourite Jakuchū… - Fish (from Colorful Realm of Living Beings), 1765 (From the Dōshoku sai-e, Museum of the Imperial Collections (Sannomaru Shōzōkan), Tokyo)
A scroll of fish gliding through water, extending Jakuchū's obsessive attention from the garden to the pond. The same feather-by-feather patience is turned on scales, fins, and the movement of water itself. - Birds and Animals in the Flower Garden (right-hand screen), 1790 (Etsuko and Joe Price Collection / Joe D. Price collection (right-hand screen of a pair))
One of a pair of screens crowded with animals — a great white elephant at the centre, surrounded by a menagerie of beasts and birds. The entire image is constructed from tens of thousands of small painted squares, a…
What was said
The Zen priest Daiten Kenjō of Shōkoku-ji bestowed on the painter the art-name Jakuchū, a Buddhist-inflected phrase evoking the idea that great fullness may appear as emptiness, marking his close ties to the monastery and to lay Buddhist practice.
Jakuchū dedicated the thirty scrolls of the 'Colorful Realm of Living Beings' to the Shōkoku-ji monastery as a religious offering, conceiving the exhaustive depiction of birds, fish, insects, and plants as an act of Buddhist devotion to all living things.
Jakuchū was the eldest son of a Kyoto wholesale greengrocer and managed the family firm until around 1755, when he passed it to a younger brother in order to paint full-time — a documented late turn from commerce to a wholly dedicated artistic life.
What would Jakuchū make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Itō Jakuchū", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Jakuchū · Keep a life moment the way Jakuchū would · Pictures made after Jakuchū