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Okuhara Seiko [Ikeda Setsu; Sekiho, Tokai Seiko]
(b Koga [now in Ibaraki Prefect.], 1837; d Kumagaya, Saitama Prefect., 1913). Japanese painter and calligrapher. She was a strikingly independent artist who flourished as a literati-style (Nanga; see JAPAN, §VI, 4(vi)(d)) painter, calligrapher and Chinese-style poet in the eclectic artistic atmosphere of the Meiji period (1868–1912). The daughter of a high-ranking clan official in Koga, she received a classical Chinese education. She was largely self-taught as a painter but studied also under the Chinese-style poet Onuma Chinzan (1818–91), the painter Hirata Suiseki (1801–68) of the TANI BUNCHO school and the Rangaku (‘Dutch studies’) scholar Takami Senseki (1785–1858). Her intense desire to pursue a painting career in the capital was contrary to strict clan laws, but her adoption by her aunt’s family, the Okuhara, allowed her to overcome this obstacle, and she moved to the capital in 1865. About this time she took the name Seiko. An individualist who dressed and acted like a man, she quickly moved to the forefront of Tokyo’s artistic and literary circles. The vigorously brushed ink paintings and calligraphy and loosely washed colour paintings of her ‘Tokai Seiko’ period (1870s–1880s) are reminiscent of those of 18th-century Chinese YANGZHOU SCHOOL eccentrics. Her work attracted a number of patrons, and hundreds of pupils trained at her school of Chinese studies and painting. In 1891, when a new railway displaced her studio home, the Bokutoen’unro, and when Tokyo’s artistic tastes had shifted towards Western aesthetics, Seiko retired to Kumagaya, north of Tokyo, where she continued to paint in her country villa studio, the Shubutsusodo or, later, the Shusuisodo. She then developed a style characterized by fine details and rich colour. Her masterpieces include mokkotsu (‘boneless’; without bounding outlines) landscape and flower paintings and bold calligraphy from the 1870s and shinkei zu (‘true view’ paintings), in particular her screens of the Sumida River in Spring (1887; priv. col., see 1988 exh. cat., pl. 26) and a handscroll of the Tsukigase Plum-blossom Valley (1896; priv. col., see 1988 exh. cat., pl. 49). Most of her works remain in regional private collections; there is, however, a major collection of her works in the Koga City Museum of History and some are also owned by the Tokyo National Museum, the Ibaraki Museum of Modern Art and the Prefectural History Museum, Mito, Saitama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, and the Municipal History Museum in Koga. Her most prominent pupils were her adopted daughter, Okuhara Seisui (1852–1921), Watanabe Seiran (1855–1918) and Takiwaki Seika (1896–1949).
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