Iwasa Matabē

Who They Were

Iwasa Matabē (岩佐又兵衛, いわさ またべえ) was a Japanese painter who lived from 1578 to 20 July 1650. He worked in the opening decades of the Tokugawa shogunate, the military government that ruled Japan from 1603 until 1868, and he is remembered for genre scenes of historical events, illustrations of classical Japanese and Chinese literature, and portraits.

His birth name was Araki Katsumochi. He was the son of Araki Murashige, a prominent daimyō — a regional warlord — of the Sengoku period, the century of civil war that ended in 1603. After his father's fall, Matabei was raised under his mother's family name, Iwasa.

He was born in Itami, in the province that is now part of Hyōgo Prefecture, and he died in Edo, the city that became Tokyo. Over his career he worked in Edo, Kyōto and Fukui.

Life and Career

Matabei's life was shaped by his father's destruction. Araki Murashige was a daimyō of the Sengoku period who was made to commit suicide, and the son survived under the Iwasa name rather than the Araki one. He entered the service of Oda Nobukatsu, a son of the unifier Oda Nobunaga, as an employer and patron.

He trained under Kanō Naizen of the Kanō school, the dominant lineage of professional painters serving the shogunate. Despite that training, Matabei was drawn more strongly to the traditions of the Tosa school, the older courtly painting lineage, and his mature brush technique combined Tosa and Kanō elements into something individual. His figures are distinctive: large heads with delicately drawn features. He worked effectively both in colour and in monochrome ink-wash painting.

In 1640 he signed a late series of portraits of the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals, commissioned by the shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu for a temple. He signed it as "the artist Matabei of the later current from Tosa Mitsunobu", openly placing himself in the Tosa line rather than the Kanō one.

His notable work includes a Rakuchū rakugai zu (洛中洛外図), a "scenes in and around the capital" screen painting, in the Funaki collection. He worked across Edo, Kyōto and Fukui, moving between the shogun's city, the old imperial capital, and the castle town of the Echizen Matsudaira lords.

His son Iwasa Katsushige, who died in 1673, was also a painter, known for dancing figures in a style resembling his father's.

Why They Matter

Matabei stands at the point where two things meet: the old courtly painting tradition of the Tosa school and the emerging popular art that became ukiyo-e, the woodblock-print and painting tradition of the Edo period's townspeople.

In Japan it is common to regard Matabei as the originator of ukiyo-e. His works have a clear affinity with the earliest ukiyo-e paintings, and the claim has been made for centuries. But scholars disagree about whether his own works are ukiyo-e at all. One line of argument holds that he was not the source of ukiyo-e but an independent painter of the Tosa school, because his patrons came from high social classes — the shōgun among them — rather than from the merchant and townsman world that ukiyo-e served.

According to that second theory, the confusion arose because Matabei was mixed up with a different ukiyo-e painter who shared the name, known as Ōtsu no Matabei, who appears as a character in plays by Chikamatsu. Two men, one name, and a reputation that drifted between them.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 岩佐又兵衛, read いわさ またべえ (iwasa matabē). The romaji is Iwasa Matabē; the macron over the final e marks a long vowel, so the last element is held longer than a plain "be".

Broken down character by character:

• 岩 — read いわ (iwa) here. It means "rock" or "boulder". It is the first element of the surname.
• 佐 — read さ (sa) here. It means "assist" or "help", and in names it often carries the sense of an assistant or aide. Together, 岩佐 (Iwasa) is the family name.
• 又 — read また (mata) here. It means "again" or "also". In male given names it is a common element, and it also appears in the phrase 又兵衛 as a whole.
• 兵 — read べえ (bē) in this compound, from an older reading of the character. It means "soldier" or "warrior".
• 衛 — read え (e) here. It means "guard" or "defend".

The last two characters, 兵衛 (bē), form a very old title-element meaning something like "soldier-guard" or "guard of soldiers". It appears constantly in pre-modern male names, especially warrior names, and by the Edo period it functioned largely as a conventional name ending rather than a literal job description. So 又兵衛 (Matabē) is a given name of the classic warrior type: "again" plus the old guard title.

Note that the surname 岩佐 is the maternal family name he was raised under, not the Araki name he was born to — the name itself records the political disaster that shaped his childhood.

Legacy

Matabei's reputation rests on a paradox that has never quite been resolved. He is either the founding father of ukiyo-e or a Tosa-school painter wrongly credited with that role, and the argument has run for generations without a settled answer.

What is not disputed is the work: the large-headed, finely featured figures, the command of both colour and ink wash, and the fusion of Tosa and Kanō methods into a personal brush. His 1640 portraits of the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals, made for Tokugawa Iemitsu, and his Rakuchū rakugai zu screens survive as the anchors of that reputation.

His son Katsushige carried the family trade into the next generation, painting dancing figures in a manner close to his father's. The Iwasa name, taken from his mother's line after Araki Murashige's forced suicide, outlasted the Araki name that his father had destroyed.