Ōoka Shunboku

Who They Were

Ōoka Shunboku (大岡春卜, おおおか しゅんぼく) was a Japanese painter of the Edo period (1603–1868), born and based in Ōsaka. He worked in the ukiyo-e tradition and was best known for bird-and-flower paintings — the genre the Japanese call kachō-ga (花鳥画, かちょうが), pictures of birds, flowers and the seasons. He lived from 1680 until 29 July 1763.

His importance, though, rests less on the paintings he made than on the paintings he copied. Shunboku engraved reproductions of famous Chinese and Japanese artists, including early masters of the Kanō school, the dominant official painting lineage of the era. He published these reproductions in printed books from the late 1710s until shortly before his death, and in doing so carried classic painting into the hands of readers across Japan.

Life and Career

Shunboku was born in Ōsaka in 1680, the eighth year of the Enpō era (延宝, えんぽう). He spent most of his professional life in that city, in the Kansai region, rather than in the shogun's capital at Edo. Ōsaka in this period was a commercial metropolis, and its publishing industry was vigorous — a useful home for an artist whose reputation would be built as much on printed books as on hanging scrolls.

His characteristic activity was reproduction. Shunboku engraved images after famous Chinese and Japanese painters, among them early exponents of the Kanō school, the hereditary workshop of painters that had supplied official art to the shogunate since the fifteenth century. Copying old masters was standard training in Edo-period painting studios, but Shunboku turned it into publication: from the late 1710s onward he reproduced numerous paintings for books, issuing them steadily until shortly before his death in 1763.

The best known of these is Ehon tekagami (絵本手鑑), published in 1720. An e-hon (絵本, えほん) is a picture book — a woodblock-printed volume in which images, not text, carry the work. The title word tekagami (手鑑, てかがみ) means a hand mirror, and by extension an album of specimens assembled for close inspection. Shunboku's Ehon tekagami is exactly that: an anthology in which he sets out to demonstrate the characteristic style of each artist he reproduces, so that a reader can learn to tell one master's hand from another's.

Why They Matter

Before photography, a painting existed in one place. Shunboku's books changed that for the Japanese painting tradition. By engraving reproductions of Chinese and Japanese masters and printing them in editions, he allowed a reader in Ōsaka — or anywhere else the books travelled — to study works that might otherwise be seen only by whoever owned them.

The reproductions had a second, unintended value. Shunboku's notes and citations record works that have since disappeared, and the names of the people who made them. Where the original painting is lost, his printed copy and its annotations may be the only surviving evidence that the work existed at all. His efforts helped propagate classic paintings throughout Japan, and they left later historians a record of the canon as an eighteenth-century Ōsaka painter understood it.

The Name in Japanese

The artist's name is written 大岡春卜. In kana it reads おおおか しゅんぼく, and in romaji, Ōoka Shunboku. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese.

大岡 (Ōoka) — the surname, read おおおか.

• 大 — read here as ō; it means "large" or "great". On its own the character is also read dai or tai.
• 岡 — read here as oka; it means "hill" or "ridge". The surname as a whole suggests something like "great hill".

春卜 (Shunboku) — the given name, read しゅんぼく.

• 春 — read here as shun; it means "spring", the season. The same character is read haru when it stands alone.
• 卜 — read here as boku; it means "divination", specifically the ancient practice of reading omens from heated animal bone or turtle shell. The character also appears in the word uranai (占い, うらない), "fortune-telling".

So the full name breaks down as "great hill" plus "spring divination" — a surname of landscape and a given name that pairs the season of renewal with the art of reading signs. Note that the -boku of Shunboku is the same character used in bokusen (卜占, ぼくせん), divination by lots. The name is not a common one, and the combination of 春 and 卜 in a personal name is distinctive enough that the artist is unlikely to be confused with anyone else.

Legacy

Shunboku died in 1763, having published reproductions of Chinese and Japanese paintings for roughly four and a half decades. His Ehon tekagami of 1720 remains the clearest statement of his method: not to invent, but to record, compare and transmit the styles of earlier masters through the medium of the printed book.

That method gave the Edo-period painting canon a wider audience than it could otherwise have reached, and it preserved traces of works and artists that would not survive in any other form. For a painter working far from the shogunate's official ateliers, in a merchant city whose strength was print, it was a durable contribution.