Okada Beisanjin

Born 1744, in Osaka; died 1820.

Painter, draughtsman. Landscapes.

Beisanjin was the son of a rice merchant and as a child studied the Confucian classics while cultivating the padi fields. For a time he was in the service of the lord of Todo in Ise. He settled in Osaka as a rice merchant and soon became a member of the scholarly circles in the town. The Bei of his artist name means rice but is also the name of the great Chinese landscape artist Mi Fu (1051-1107), whose style (using small horizontal strokes) Beisanjin sometimes copied.

Beisanjin was a self-taught painter known mainly for his fairly formal and traditional landscapes. The tops of symmetrically formed, rounded hills almost always take up a large part of his works, the slopes being covered with long, thin parallel strokes without any particular significance. This could be a considerable simplification of the Chinese convention of the texture of hemp fibre. With the hills Beisanjin combines trees in the Chinese style, rocks of uniform appearance, and a few figures (scholars out walking, fishermen). His repertoire of shapes is limited. He is representative of the Nanga School (scholar painters). His son Hanko (1782-1846) is considered to be a better painter than his father.

"OKADA, Beisanjin." In Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/benezit/B00015366 (accessed May 8, 2012).