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context: painting > great schools > maruyama
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Mandarin Ducks and Willows |
Ito Jakuchu 1716-1800
He's an odd artist. He was best known for his brilliantly coloured paintings of birds, especially roosters - they are realistic in an almost Pop Art, Mel Ramos (without the naked women) poster paints style. I've gone for a rather more subdued painting by him here.
More interestingly, but harder to find, especially in ways that you could make out the detail here, he did a few pseudo-mosaic works, large screen paintings with big animals, where they are broken into grids totalling over 85,000 squares; then each were individually painted. I've no idea what he was up to, but unsurprisingly it didn't catch on - parallels with Seurat are hard to resist.