Baroque Age
Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716)
Japanese Edo Painting Schools painter.
Ogata Kōrin was born in Kyoto into the Kariganeya, a prosperous drapery house that dressed the court and the great families of the old capital. Raised amid bolts of patterned silk, calligraphy, and Nō theatre, he turned seriously to painting only after the family fortune declined, studying the Kanō school but soon looking back to the decorative manner of Tawaraya Sōtatsu and the calligrapher Hon'ami Kōetsu. From that lineage he forged the mature style later called Rinpa — literally 'the school of [Kō]rin' — built on flat gold grounds, bold silhouetted design, and the wet-pooling pigment technique of tarashikomi.
Working in Kyoto and for a time in Edo, Kōrin ranged across folding screens, hanging scrolls, fans, lacquer, and textile design, often collaborating with his younger brother, the potter Ogata Kenzan. His acknowledged masterpieces are gold-ground screens: the 'Irises' (Kakitsubata-zu) of the Nezu Museum, distilling a famous episode of the 'Tales of Ise' into rhythm and colour alone, and the 'Red and White Plum Blossoms' (Kōhakubai-zu) of the MOA Museum, a National Treasure in which two flowering trees flank a stylised, patterned stream. He also reworked Sōtatsu's celebrated 'Wind God and Thunder God' composition, carrying an earlier Rinpa design forward as homage.
Kōrin's reputation dimmed after his death, then was deliberately revived a century later by the Edo painter Sakai Hōitsu, whose 1815 centenary tributes fixed 'Rinpa' as a named tradition. In the following century, as Japan reopened and Japonisme swept Europe, the flat patterning and asymmetric gold-ground design of the Rinpa manner fed directly into Art Nouveau and the decorative ambitions of painters such as Gustav Klimt — carrying Kōrin's sensibility far beyond Kyoto, even where no single thread of direct instruction can be traced.
The words the record keeps using: elegant, decorative, rhythmic, refined, opulent, distilled, poised.
At a glance
- Lived 1658–1716
- Origin Japanese
- Worked in Kyoto
- Era Baroque Age
- Movements Edo Painting Schools
- Mediums Ink on silk, Ink, color, and gold on folding screen
- Techniques Tarashikomi
Works in the archive
- Irises (Kakitsubata-zu), 1701 (Nezu Museum, Tokyo (one of a pair of six-panel folding screens; left screen shown))
One of a pair of six-panel screens showing nothing but clumps of blue irises on a plain gold ground. The image alludes to the Yatsuhashi ('Eight Bridges') episode of the classical 'Tales of Ise', in which a traveller… - Portrait of Nakamura Kuranosuke, 1704 (Museum Yamato Bunkakan, Nara)
A rare figure work: Kōrin's portrait of Nakamura Kuranosuke, a wealthy official of the Kyoto mint and one of his patrons, seated in a splendid patterned robe. It shows the designer's eye turned to a living sitter, the… - Red and White Plum Blossoms (Kōhakubai-zu), 1710 (MOA Museum of Art, Atami (National Treasure of Japan))
A pair-panel screen with an old white plum on the left, a young red plum on the right, and between them a broad, silver-darkened stream patterned into swirling eddies. It is Kōrin's most celebrated design: the contrast… - Wind God and Thunder God (Fūjin Raijin-zu), 1710 (Tokyo National Museum (Important Cultural Property))
Kōrin's close copy of Tawaraya Sōtatsu's famous composition: the green Wind God with his billowing bag of winds bounds in from the right, the white Thunder God with his ring of drums from the left, each on a bare gold…
What was said
A century after Kōrin's death the Edo painter Sakai Hōitsu revived his reputation, holding a hundredth-anniversary memorial and publishing woodblock albums reproducing Kōrin's designs, thereby establishing the master as the founder of a named tradition.
Scholars identify tarashikomi — dropping pigment or ink into an area still wet so that the two pool and mottle together — as the defining technical signature of the Rinpa manner Kōrin brought to maturity, visible above all in the bark of his plum trees.
Art historians place Kōrin at the centre of the Rinpa lineage, building on the decorative designs of Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Hon'ami Kōetsu and transmitting them, through Hōitsu's revival, into a tradition whose flat gold-ground patterning later resonated with European Art Nouveau.
Lineage
Learned from Tawaraya Sōtatsu
What would Kōrin 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 Ogata Kōrin", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Kōrin · Keep a life moment the way Kōrin would · Pictures made after Kōrin