Kitano Tsunetomi was mocked by the painters of his own day as belonging to the devil’s school. Whether they meant his strange way of making a picture, said with some envy, or a certain eccentric character, is not clear; but abuse from one’s contemporaries usually turns into an attractive catchphrase in a later age — much like the “blurred style” first thrown at Hishida Shunso and Yokoyama Taikan as a criticism.

Whether Aono Amanatsu is a painter of bijinga I honestly do not know. I think of her as a free painter. As the joker can stand for any card in a game, she is a painter of beautiful women as well. And, more than anything, a Japanese-style painter.

Ito Shinsui is an important painter — the last painter of bijinga, one might call him. There is a reason for saying “last”. Yasunari Ikenaga, the contemporary painter we back, has set out a new image of bijinga for Japan in the twenty-first century; but if the definition of modern bijinga is the elegant painting of a woman in kimono in the Japanese manner, then after Shinsui put the finished form of it before the world, bijinga held a place in the central painting world for the last time. The reasons are these…

Otake Ayana’s command of painting is among the finest of any Japanese-style painter of the first half of the twenty-first century. Within the current one might call the bijinga school, which has risen sharply over the past ten years around Yasunari Ikenaga, she stands a head — no, two heads — above the rest.

At the head of this column I said that Fukutomi Taro was my master in spirit. The painter most closely bound up with Fukutomi is Kaburaki Kiyokata. He was, I think, the painter Fukutomi held in the highest regard and felt closest to.

Say Okamoto Shinso and you mean that woman putting on lipstick. A woman in a glossy kimono, painting her lips. The picture is brilliant and the air of her hangs over it. But the smile on the face of the woman holding the lipstick is comic. There is no other bijinga in which foolishness is exaggerated like this. Why did Shinso paint such a picture?

Looking at the women Nakahara paints, one may feel one has seen them somewhere before. They are figures with a strong sense of fashion about them. Her work has in fact been used in advertising for a cosmetics company.

Okamoto says she does not want to paint a woman as she looks to a man. She wants to paint woman herself, and the force by which a woman lives. Within a market logic that says a picture will sell as long as a pretty woman is in it, how is a woman to assert that she is a woman?

Yasunari Ikenaga asked a plain question: why is the ordinary business of painting the woman you love nowhere to be found in the painting world of today? To start a movement for painting beautiful women in the Japanese manner he coined the name Yubi no Ha, the School of the Finger, and gathered others to it.

After Uemura Shoen, Ito Shinsui and Utamaro, it is about time I introduced our hero: Kainosho Tadaoto. If Utamaro made the category, Shoen made the world at large acknowledge it, and Shinsui took it on with ease, then Kainosho is the man who brought the self into bijinga.

When one speaks of a line of descent in bijinga, Yumeji is not at the centre of it. If bijinga is a large island, he sits alone on a small one offshore. He had no master and no pupils. Nobody painted like him before, and nobody has since. And yet, if there is such a thing as the ideal of bijinga, he is in fact right at the middle of it.

Utamaro is a presence that feels like a kind of phantom. Even as a dealer in ukiyo-e, there is something in him that will not let you say easily that you have understood. Ukiyo-e is the origin of what we call bijinga, but its method ignores individuality on principle.

Continuing with Uemura Shoen, what I want to touch on here is her calligraphy. Besides the signature and seal within the picture, a Japanese painting has a hakogaki — the title and signature written on its box — and without it the work is not finished.

The first painter I want to take up is Uemura Shoen. To name her as the representative bijinga painter is the most obvious thing in the world, and since we care deeply about this genre, putting Shoen first may look far too ordinary a choice.

It is now some ten years since we quietly made bijinga our speciality. Our fondness for paintings of beautiful women began with our respect for Fukutomi Taro. He was a customer of Shibunkaku, the firm run by my grandfather, where my father worked for many years before he founded SHUKADO.