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Satake Shozan [Yoshiatsu; Dairoku]
(b Edo [now Tokyo], 1748; d ?Akita, 1785). Japanese painter and daimyo. Lord of the domain of Akita in Dewa Province (now Akita Prefect.), patron and practitioner of Akita ranga (‘Akita Dutch painting’), the school of Western-style painting based in his fief, Shozan advocated empirical study as a means of acquiring practical knowledge. Interested in the study of medicinal plants and in Western technology, he invited the polymath HIRAGA GENNAI to Akita in 1773 to revive the domain’s copper-mining industry. Shozan and some of his retainers took instruction in Western-style painting from Gennai during his stay. After the latter’s return to Edo, Shozan sent his vassal ODANO NAOTAKE there to reside with Gennai and continue the study of Western descriptive realism. In 1778, with the assistance of Naotake, Shozan composed three illustrated treatises: Gaho koryo (‘Summary of the laws of painting’; priv. col.), Gato rikai (‘Understanding painting’; priv. col.), and Tanseibu (‘Red and blue’), which address theoretical and practical aspects of Western-style painting for the first time in Japan. The treatises, with diagrams and explanatory drawings based on the Dutch manual Groot schilderboek (Amsterdam, 1712) by Gérard de Lairesse, are contained in one of three albums of nature studies compiled by Shozan that served him as both visual reference works and objects of aesthetic enjoyment. The illustrations of flowers, birds and insects in these albums are a mixture of Shozan’s drawings from life, works attributable to Odano Naotake and faithful copies of illustrations in similar albums executed by fellow daimyo–artists, such as Hosokawa Shigekata (1720–1785), who shared Shozan’s interest in natural science. Shozan the empiricist valued Western painting for its useful descriptive capabilities. For this reason he also appreciated the naturalistic bird-and-flower (kachoga) style of the Chinese painter SHEN NANPIN. The Akita school style fostered by Shozan was a blend of Eastern and Western elements. This is seen in Kakitsubata ni naifu zu (‘Iris and knife’) (priv. col.), in which he used chiaroscuro to convey the volume of the cylindrical vase while the iris blossoms and leaves are presented in a classic tripartite decorative floral arrangement.
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