Hanabusa Itchō

Training under Kanō Yasunobu is recorded. Sawaki Sūshi, Hanabusa Ippō and Hanabusa Isshū are recorded as having studied under Hanabusa Itchō. The recorded working language is Japanese. The field of work recorded is visual arts, calligraphy and haiku. Work by Hanabusa Itchō is recorded in the collections of Minneapolis Institute of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Cleveland Museum of Art and Detroit Institute of Arts.

The son of a physician, he was originally named Taga Shinkō. He studied Kanō painting, but soon abandoned the school and his master to form his own style, which would come to be known as the Hanabusa school. He was exiled in 1698, for parodying one of the shōgun's concubines in painting, to the island of Miyake-jima; he would not return until 1710. That year, in Edo, the artist would formally take the name Hanabusa Itchō. Most of his paintings depicted typical urban life in Edo, and were approached from the perspective of a literati painter. His style, in-between the Kanō and ukiyo-e, is said to have been "more poetic and less formalistic than the Kanō school, and typical of the "bourgeois" spirit of the Genroku period". Hanabusa was the master of the later painter Sawaki Suushi. His humorous caricature paintings, depicting parodic scenes drawn from noh, kabuki and Japanese mythology, later influenced the comic print albums produced by the ukiyo-e artist Okumura Masanobu. His school was continued by his successor Hanabusa Ikkei; the gō "Gototei", later used by Utagawa Kunisada, was itself formed by combining the art names of Hanabusa Itchō and Ikkei, with whom Kunisada had studied a new painting style around 1824–1825. Hanabusa studied poetry under the master Matsuo Bashō, and is said to have been an excellent calligrapher as well. His friends included the poets Matsuo Bashō and Enomoto Kikaku. His work is held in several institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Libraries, the Israel Museum, the Suntory Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Cultural History Oslo, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Museum of Korea, and the British Museum.