The Power of Indirect Transmission and the Kōrin Hyakuzu (ca. 1815 and 1826)

Shortly before his death in 1716, the famous painter Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716) remarked to one of his sons: “Since I lack a family business, it was hard for me to provide security for you.” In spite of maintaining a studio with assistants, Kōrin did not establish a painting lineage that extended beyond his death. Still, the style established by Kōrin became the hallmark of Japanese painting from the late Edo period (1615-1868) into the modern age. Kōrin’s immense popularity owes in large part to the efforts of the painter Sakai Hōitsu (1761-1829). Hōitsu championed Kōrin’s style in his own works and disseminated his interpretation of the artist through printed publications like the Kōrin hyakuzu (One Hundred Pictures by Kōrin). Kōrin hyakuzu, a publication begun as the record of a memorial exhibition of Kōrin’s works held in 1815, was more than a simple record of a commemorative event; the wood block-printed publication, enhanced by a second edition in 1826, represents Hōitsu’s manifesto as an artist through the lens of Kōrin’s afterlife. I argue that Hōitsu, who shaped his artistry after Kōrin’s model, embraced the painter as his spiritual and aesthetic brethren. Through visual and textual analysis of the Kōrin hyakuzu, the paper will show that the publication represents the ultimate embodiment of Hōitsu’s claim to Kōrin’s metaphysical and artistic ancestry. We will also explore how the publication functions as a confluence of the past and the present. Hōitsu achieves that by presenting the Kōrin hyakuzu as the ultimate guide to discovering Kōrin, a discovery channeled through Hōitsu’s own interpretation of him.