The Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa Itcho (1652–1724)

Although not very well known today, when the first histories of early modern authors and artists were written in the late eighteenth century, the name of the painter Hanabusa Itcho was often cited. His works were well circulated in his lifetime, he and his studio repeated his original designs, and he made designs for other artists to use. Head of his own studio, he later became known as the founder the Hanabusa School. Followers perpetuated his motifs, sometimes spuriously adding Itcho's name to their own works. Artists of the nineteenth century, especially those in the Utagawa School of ukiyo-e, not only complimented him by imitation, but also lauded him for having created the genre of giga (a playfully humorous kind of painting). In fact, in the mid-eighteenth century, a printed collection of his designs, Itcho gafu---one of the first monographic art books published in Japan---helped define the genre of giga. Exiled during his lifetime for indeterminable reasons, moreover, the cause his exile became the source of speculation and the cause for his posthumous notoriety as social-rebel. A deeper understanding of Itcho---of both his life and his work---depends on our ability to see him in his multiple personas during his lifetime, and to view his life and work in terms of afterlives. Historically, I place Itcho's life and afterlives within the context of the development of the idea of the artist in early modern Japan, seeing the rise of the artist and writers as a corollary to the growth in the means of cultural reproduction. I move from Itcho's work as he formulated it within the aesthetic framework of haikai to the ways it was valorized as giga in the nineteenth century. Additionally, I examine the nineteenth century bifurcation of Itcho into, on the one hand, the trajectory of the formation of artist "biography," a form concerned with the true facts about the artist found increasingly in biographical compendia, and, on the other hand, "legend" as this was realized in the fictional worlds of theatre, novels, and prints.