Soga Shōhaku

Soga Shōhaku (born 1730, Ise or Kyōto, Japan—died Jan. 30, 1781, Kyōto) was a Japanese painter of the mid-Tokugawa period (1603–1867) who tried to revive the brush-style drawing of the great masters of the Muromachi period (1338–1573).

As a young man he studied painting under the guidance of Takada Keiho of the Kanō school (school of painting based on Chinese subject matter and techniques) in Kyōto, but his disillusionment with contemporary art led him to look into the past. He came particularly to appreciate the works of the Muromachi painter Soga Jasoku and called himself Jasoku ken, or Jasoku jussei (“the tenth”). He excelled in ink monochrome portraits, which he made with powerful brushwork using broad strokes. The two-scroll painting “Kanzan and Jittoku”—two Chinese monks of the T’ang dynasty—is a good example. He also drew pictures of weird and demoniac quality and, being of a haughty disposition and an eccentric, was regarded by many as either a madman or an anachronism. He had no successors to carry on his style.