"THE PAINTINGS OF JAKUCHŪ" par Money L. HICKMAN & Yasuhiro SATŌ. Editions The Asia Society Galleries, New York. 1989. Edition originale. Imprimé au Japon. in-4, dos droit, couverture souple cartonnée illustrée en couleurs. 224 pages. Texte en anglais illustré de nombreuses reproductions photographiques, noir & blanc et couleurs, in-texte et hors texte, d'œuvres de Itō Jakuchū. Ouvrage réalisé dans le cadre de l'exposition éponyme itinérante à The Asia Soctiety Galleries, New York, du 05 Octobre au 06 Décembre 1989 et au Los Angeles County Museum of Art, du 21 Décembre 1989 au 02 Février 1990.

 

"During his long and productive career, the Japanese artist Ito Jakuchū produced a substantial corpus of paintings that is much admired for its distinctive beauty and conceptual originality. Jakuchū's life (1716-1800) coincided with a period of remarkable creativity in the history of Japanese painting, and the ancient capital city of Kyoto, where Jakuchū was born and where he pursued his painting, was the most important center of this artistic activity. In the course of the two and a half centuries conventionally referred to as the Edo period (1615-1868), when Japan was controlled by the Bakufu government of the Tokugawa line of shoguns, prevailing peace and stability stimulated agricultural production and the economy, and encouraged learning and the arts, which flourished with exceptional vigor and variety…

It is fair to say that the picture of Jakuchū's life preserved in written materials is more accurate and substantive than those of most of the artists of his time - not because the corpus of information is particularly extensive, but rather because it is diverse, generally accurate in detail, and in good portion based on knowledgeable observations of the artist by a close friend. Jakuchū was much respected in artistic circles during the later decades of his protracted career, and it is therefore not surprising that biographical entries on him appear in various traditional art-historical writings of the late Edo period…"

 

Ref LCU0253