Tawaraya Sotatsu

• Japanese: 俵屋宗達 (Tawaraya Soutatsu)

Tawaraya Sôtatsu was a machi-eshi painter active in Kyoto in the early decades of the 17th century. Along with Hon'ami Kôetsu, with whom he worked closely, he is considered one of the forerunners of the Rinpa style, which was founded by Ogata Kôrin roughly a century later explicitly imitating and reviving the style of Kôetsu and Sôtatsu.

He was the proprietor of a shop, called the Tawaraya, specializing in producing paintings, fans, dolls, and other small objects for a largely chônin (commoner/townspeople) market, though he had samurai and kuge customers as well. Through these aristocratic connections, he began to receive commissions from the court itself. The painting of a series of doors and panels for the Yôgen-in in 1621 was perhaps the first of these commissions; of those which survive, the gilded wall panels are decorated chiefly with pine tree motifs, while the doors feature pictures of lions and elephants. Shortly afterwards, he was granted the honorary title of hokkyô by Emperor Go-Mizunoo.

Sôtatsu may have studied painting under the court painter Kaihô Yûshô. In 1602, he engaged in the repair of the Heike nôkyô, a copy of the Lotus Sutra belonging to the Taira clan and dating back to 1164.

Kôetsu was granted a plot of land in Takagamine in 1615 by Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Sôtatsu joined him in establishing there, in the hills to the northwest of Kyoto proper, an artists' colony that included Kôetsu's extended family, and roughly fifty other households. Most, if not all, of the members of the community were commoners (chônin - townspeople), but were rather prominent and influential townsmen; whether for Kôetsu or Sôtatsu specifically, or for the community more generally, Takagamine saw not infrequent visits from noblemen, and on at least one occasion, in 1638, from the Empress Tôfukumon'in.

References

• Lillehoj, Elizabeth. Art and Palace Politics in Early Modern Japan 1580s-1680s. Brill Publishing, 2011. pp176-184.