was a Japanese painter and copperplate engraver. A leading figure in Japanese painting during the late

Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

, he is credited with introducing

Western painting The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from classical antiquity, antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with Representational art, representational ...

to Japan.

Biography

Early life

Aōdō was born in 1748 in

Sukagawa file:Sukagawa City Hall.jpg, 270px, Sukagawa City Hall is a Cities of Japan, city located in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 76,251 in 38824 households, and a population density of 270 persons per km2. The tot ...

, Mutsu Province (now

Fukushima Prefecture is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture of Japan located in the Tōhoku region of Honshu. Fukushima Prefecture has a population of 1,771,100 () and has a geographic area of . Fukushima Prefecture borders Miyagi Prefecture and Yamagata Prefecture ...

), Japan. He was the second son of Sōshirō Nagata, a wealthy farm implement dealer. Upon the death of his father, he helped his older brother, Jokichi, who was a dyer, for a long time. Jokichi had a penchant for painting, and while working in the family business, Zenkichi learned painting from him.

Painting career

In his painting career, Aōdō employed Western-style painting techniques such as perspective and shading to achieve Western-style copperplate engraving. Adding Edo customs to Shiba Kokan's Western-style landscape paintings, he discovered new landscapes and perfected Western-style landscape copperplate engravings.

Legacy

Sadaki Ota's Aōdō Denzen Collection, owned by the

museum, was declared an important culturally significant in 1986. In 2001,

Eiji Tsuburaya was a Japanese special effects director, filmmaker, and cinematographer. A co-creator of the ''Godzilla (franchise), Godzilla'' and ''Ultraman'' franchises, he is considered one of the most important and influential figures in the history o ...

biographers cited Aōdō as an ancestor of Tsuburaya, claiming Tsuburaya inherited Aōdō's dexterity.

References

Bibliography

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External links

Aōdō Denzen
at Sukagawa City 1740s births 1822 deaths 18th-century Japanese painters 19th-century Japanese painters People of the Edo period Japanese landscape painters 18th-century Japanese engravers 19th-century Japanese engravers {{Japan-painter-stub