was a Japanese painter and

copperplate engraver Intaglio ( ; ) is the family of printing and printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a surface and the incised line or sunken area holds the ink. It is the direct opposite of a relief print where the parts of the matrix that m ...

. A leading figure in Japanese painting during the late Edo period, he is credited with introducing Western painting to Japan.

Biography

Early life

Aōdō was born in 1748 in Sukagawa,

Mutsu Province was an old province of Japan in the area of Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate and Aomori Prefectures and the municipalities of Kazuno and Kosaka in Akita Prefecture. Mutsu Province is also known as or . The term is often used to refer to the comb ...

(now

Fukushima Prefecture Fukushima Prefecture (; ja, 福島県, Fukushima-ken, ) is a prefecture of Japan located in the Tōhoku region of Honshu. Fukushima Prefecture has a population of 1,810,286 () and has a geographic area of . Fukushima Prefecture borders Miya ...

), Japan. He was the second son of Sōshirō Nagata, a wealthy farm implement dealer. Upon the death of his father, he helped his older brother, Jokichi, who was a dyer, for a long time. Jokichi had a penchant for painting, and while working in the family business, Zenkichi learned painting from him.

Painting career

In his painting career, Aōdō employed Western-style painting techniques such as perspective and shading to achieve Western-style copperplate engraving. Adding Edo customs to Shiba Kokan's Western-style landscape paintings, he discovered new landscapes and perfected Western-style landscape copperplate engravings.

Legacy

Sadaki Ota's Aōdō Denzen Collection, owned by the city museum, was declared an important cultural property of the prefecture in 1986. In 2001, Eiji Tsuburaya biographers cited Aōdō as an ancestor of Tsuburaya, claiming Tsuburaya inherited Aōdō's dexterity.

References

Bibliography

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External links

Aōdō Denzen
at Sukagawa City 1748 births 1822 deaths Japanese painters People of Edo-period Japan 19th-century Japanese painters Japanese landscape painters Japanese engravers {{Japan-painter-stub