Hanabusa Itchō was born in Kyoto in 1652. His father, Taga Hakuan, was a physician who served Ishikawa Tonomonokami Noriyuki, lord of the Ise Kameyama domain. When Itchō was fifteen (or possibly when he was eight), his family accompanied their lord to Edo. Itchō’s mother’s family name may have been Hanabusa. It is thought that Itchō, returning to Edo after being exiled to a distant island, took the name Hanabusa from his mother’s side of the family.

Itchō was apprenticed to Kanō Yasunobu, head of the Kanō school, and mastered the sophisticated painting techniques of the Edo Kanō school and received a broad range of training in the classics. Gradually he broke out of the Kanō school confines to establish his own unique pictorial world. His lively depictions of the human figure, humorous perspectives, and the solid painting technique acquired through his Kanō school training all worked together in his unparalleled paintings of manners and customs. Itchō swiftly became a highly popular artist. He produced many comical works, the result of, twists on classic themes, and elevated the knowledge he had acquired as Yasunobu’s pupil to new heights in a style unique to Itchō.

His fresh sensibility may have been cultivated through haikai, a humorous linked-verse form. He studied with the master poet Matsuo Bashō while in his twenties and thirties and was on close terms with the haikai masters Takarai Kikaku and Hattori Ransetsu throughout his life. Composing under the nom de plume granted him, Gyōun, he left us many verses that he composed under that name. His view of the world enriched by haikai wit and humor, significantly influenced Itchō’s approach as a painter.

Itchō’s works, in all their variety, also include paintings directly addressing such orthodox topics as Buddhist, landscape, and bird-and-flower paintings. In them we can see the pride and confidence he maintained as a Kanō-school painter.

This section follows Itchō in his early period, when he was using the name Taga Chōko and, with his foundations in the Kanō school, was developing his abilities as a genre painter, depicting the everyday activities and small pleasures of daily life. It also showcases his multiple talents, introducing his activities in the haikai world.

In his forties, when Itchō had achieved unshakable popularity, tragedy suddenly struck. In 1698, he was arrested on suspicion related to rumors of his having made sarcastic remarks about the Laws of Compassion promulgated by Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, the fifth Tokugawa shogun, and was exiled to Miyakejima, an island 180 kilometers south of Edo. Since the real culprit in that case was immediately caught, however, it is thought that that was not the actual reason for Itchō’s exile. The leading explanation is that the source of his trouble was his working as a taikomochi, a professional jester in the Yoshiwara, the Edo licensed quarter. In that role, Itchō interacted with daimyo and other important figures. He is said to have attracted the attention of the shogunate for acts that included inviting a relative of Keishōin, Tsunayoshi’s mother, to a brothel and getting him pay an extravagant sum to buy a courtesan out of bondage. Island exiles were in principle for life, and Itchō is thought to have prepared to spend the rest of his life without ever setting foot in Edo again. Luckily for him, with Tsunayoshi’s death in 1709, a pardon was issued by the new shogun, and Itchō returned to Edo.

His works during his exile can be divided into two types: those commissioned by friends and acquaintances back in Edo and those he created for people living on Miyakejima and nearby islands. The first type included many genre paintings depicting people engaged in amusements; he used with great care the paper and pigments that were sent from Edo and worked in a vivid style. The majority of the latter type were works with religious associations, including paintings of gods and Buddhas and of auspicious subject. They are characterized by a sound, gentle style.

Itchō spent twelve years on Miyakejima, from the age of 47 to 58. During that period, he created many of the works now emblematic of his oeuvre that later generations called Shima Itchō (“island Itchō”). This section introduces, through masterpieces Shima Itchō created during his exile, the nature of that work.

Itchō, having made his miraculous return from exile on Miyakejima to Edo, changed his art name to Hanabusa Itchō and engaged passionately in production. His name is based on the famous butterfly story told by Zhuang Zhou, a Warring States period Chinese thinker. Zhuang Zhou told of suddenly waking up after dreaming he was a butterfly. Upon awakening, he did not know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Itchō’s feelings of confusion over which was dream or reality, life on the island or the announcement of his pardon, are expressed in that name.

After his return, he announced that he would not produce the satirical genre paintings he had been creating, distancing himself from the paintings of everyday life that had been synonymous with the name Itchō. He backed up that announcement by producing an increasing number of meticulous Buddhist paintings, bird-and-flower and landscape paintings following the rules of the Kanō school style, narrative paintings that seriously addressed classic themes, and ancient Chinese figures. Orders for his genre paintings did not, however, cease. He created many large screen paintings, including Taking Shelter from the Rain and Rural Genre Scenes, that add his characteristic humor to paintings of human activity in the city and the countryside. He also continued to produce comical paintings that reworked classic themes. In them we can see that his innate sense of humor was alive and well after his return to Edo. His haikai friends Kikaku and Ransetsu had died while he was in exile. He was never to meet them again, but he sustained his connections with haikai, and he contributed illustrations to various books of haikai poetry.

Itchō died in 1724 at the age of seventy-three. The verse he composed just before his death displays his great confidence in having dedicated his life to depicting ordinary life:
Deceptive
ukiyo, a trick
of color:
the moon against a colorless gray sky*1

This concluding section of the exhibition highlights, through superb works from his final period and his contributions to books of haikai poetry, the oeuvre and the character of Hanabusa Itchō, “A Talented Man of Great Refinement,” whose extraordinary abilities and sophisticated aesthetic are captivating.

*1: Translation by Miriam Wattles.