Miyagawa Chōshun ( ja, 宮川長春; 1683 – 18 December 1753) was a Japanese painter in the

ukiyo-e Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surfac ...

style. Founder of the Miyagawa school, he and his pupils are among the few ukiyo-e artists to have never created

woodblock prints Woodblock printing or block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. Each page or image is crea ...

. He was born in Miyagawa, in Owari Province, but lived much of his later life in Edo, where he died. Chōshun trained under artists of the Tosa and

Kanō school The is one of the most famous schools of Japanese painting. The Kanō school of painting was the dominant style of painting from the late 15th century until the Meiji period which began in 1868, by which time the school had divided into many di ...

s, as well as under the master of early ukiyo-e,

Hishikawa Moronobu Hishikawa Moronobu ( ja, 菱川師宣; 1618 – 25 July 1694) was a Japanese artist known for popularizing the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock prints and paintings in the late 17th century. He consolidated the works of scattered Japanese art s ...

. These influences are evident in his works, along with those of the Kaigetsudō school, but ultimately Chōshun, as the founder of a new school of painting, has a unique style all his own. His figures have a soft, warm femininity about them, and Richard Lane considers his coloring among the best in all of ukiyo-e art. Lane, Richard (1978). "Images of the Floating World." Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky. p90. His works are almost exclusively of courtesans, and in his works these figures are fuller, and more voluptuous than those of many other artists, in particular those of the somewhat later artist Harunobu. Though many of his pieces are clean ones of courtesans, Chōshun and his students also produced a great number of works of ''

shunga is a type of Japanese erotic art typically executed as a kind of ukiyo-e, often in woodblock print format. While rare, there are also extant erotic painted handscrolls which predate ukiyo-e. Translated literally, the Japanese word ''shunga' ...

'' (erotic paintings). Miyagawa Chōshun had a number of pupils, including his son Shunsui, Chōki (who may have also been his son), and Isshō. In 1751, a few years before his death, Chōshun was commissioned by an artist of the Kanō school to perform some restoration work at the

Nikkō Tōshō-gū is a Tōshō-gū Shinto shrine located in Nikkō, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. Together with Futarasan Shrine and Rinnō-ji, it forms the Shrines and Temples of Nikkō UNESCO World Heritage Site, with 42 structures of the shrine included in t ...

. When Chōshun was not paid for his work, an altercation erupted which ended in the death of the Kanō artist at the hands of Chōshun's son. As a result, Chōshun was banished from Edo for a year.

Gallery

Miyagawa Chosun - Nanshoku 04.jpg,

Nanshoku Records of men who have sex with men in Japan date back to ancient times. Western scholars have identified these as evidence of homosexuality in Japan. Though these relations had existed in Japan for millennia, they became most apparent to schol ...

(male-male) shunga handscroll Miyagawa Chosun - Nanshoku 03.jpg,

(male-male) shunga handscroll Ryukyuan Dancer and Musicians by Miyagawa Choshun, c. 1718.jpg, ''Ryūkyūan Dancer and Musicians', MET DP-12232-115.jpg, ''Gyoran Kannon'', a

bijin-ga is a generic term for pictures of beautiful women () in Japanese art, especially in woodblock printing of the ukiyo-e genre. Definition defines as a picture that simply "emphasizes the beauty of women", and the ''Shincho Encyclopedia o ...

scroll

Notes

References

* Lane, Richard. (1978). ''Images from the Floating World, The Japanese Print.'' Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OCLC 5246796

External links

Bridge of dreams: the Mary Griggs Burke collection of Japanese art
a catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Miyagawa Chōshun (see index) {{DEFAULTSORT:Miyagawa, Choshun 1683 births 1753 deaths Ukiyo-e artists 18th-century Japanese artists