A portrait of Kimura Kenkado by Tani Buncho

was a Japanese scholar, artist and art connoisseur. Kimura's family were

sake Sake, also spelled saké ( ; also referred to as Japanese rice wine), is an alcoholic beverage of Japanese origin made by fermenting rice that has been polished to remove the bran. Despite the name ''Japanese rice wine'', sake, and indee ...

merchants, and he followed the family trade, but was obliged to move into the stationery business after being convicted of excessive alcohol production. At an early age, Kimura was trained in painting by Ōoka Shunboku and Yanagisawa Kien. He also studied the natural sciences, learning from Tsushima Tsunenoshin and

Ono Ranzan , also known as , was a Japanese botanist and herbalist, known as the "Japanese Linnaeus". Ono's real surname was ; his adult given name was . became his art name and his Chinese style courtesy name. He was born in Kyoto to a courtly family, ...

. After retiring to

Ise Ise may refer to: Places * Ise, Mie, a city in Japan **Ise Grand Shrine, a Shinto shrine located in Ise, Mie * Ise Ekiti, a city in Nigeria *Ise, Norway, a village in Norway *Ise Province, an ancient province of Japan * River Ise, a tributary of th ...

, he spent his time collecting ''objects d'art'' and painting, earning a reputation as a capable landscape painter of the ''nanga'' school under the pen-name Sonsai. His collection was highly respected, and was purchased by the Japanese government after his death for the considerable sum of 500

ryō The was a gold currency unit in the shakkanhō system in pre- Meiji Japan. It was eventually replaced with a system based on the '' yen''. Origins The ''ryō'' was originally a unit of weight from China, the ''tael.'' It came into use in Jap ...

. Kimura was also a devotee of the

tea ceremony An East Asian tea ceremony, or ''Chádào'' (), or ''Dado'' ( ko, 다도 (茶道)), is a ceremonially ritualized form of making tea (茶 ''cha'') practiced in East Asia by the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. The tea ceremony (), literally transl ...

, which he studied under

Baisao (1675–1763) was a Japanese Buddhist monk of the Ōbaku school of Zen Buddhism, who became famous for traveling around Kyoto selling tea. The veneration of Baisao during and after his lifetime helped to popularize sencha tea and led to the ...

; Kimura himself was largely responsible for codifying the use of utensils and the processes for the

sencha is a type of Japanese ''ryokucha'' (, green tea) which is prepared by infusing the processed whole tea leaves in hot water. This is as opposed to matcha (), powdered Japanese green tea, where the green tea powder is mixed with hot water and t ...

ceremony.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kimura, Kenkado Japanese artists 1736 births 1802 deaths Japanese diarists 18th-century diarists 19th-century diarists