Ide Gakusui

Ide Gakusui 井出岳水 (1899-19781)

BIOGRAPHY

Sources: Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: 1900-1975, Helen Merritt and Nanako Yamada, University of Hawaii Press, 1992, p. 38; Catalogue of Wood-Cut Color Prints by Contemporary Japanese Artists, S. Watanabe Color Print Co., 1962, p. 78; wikipedia https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%95%E5%87%BA%E5%B2%B3%E6%B0%B4

A traditional painter in the Japanese style (nihonga) who specialized in kacho-ga (bird and flower drawings), Ide designed prints for the Watanabe Publishing Company beginning in the spring of 1949 and continued his association with Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885-1962) until the mid-1950s. Watanabe's 1963 catalog lists fifteen prints Ide designed, all of them of the bird and flower genre. (Three of his best known designs for Watanabe are pictured below.) After his collaboration with Watanabe, Gakusui continued to design prints through the late 1950s. It is unclear who published his prints after his association with Watanabe as they do not bear a publisher's mark.

Born in Funatsumura, Minami-Tsurun gun, Yamanashi Prefecture, his real name was Ide Taizō 井出泰三. After graduating from Nippon University College of Art, he studied nihonga painting with Yamanouchi Tamon (1878-1932) and, after Tamo's death, with Arai Kanpō (1878-1945)2, a nihonga painter and print designer.

In 1929 he moved to China where he was to stay until after the end of WWII in 1946. While in China he traveled widely. Settling in Shanghai, he opened a Japanese-style painting school. After his return to Japan he served as director of the Fine Arts Education Association (美術育英協会) and at least one of his paintings was acquired by the Imperial Household Agency (Kunaichō).

1Merritt and others give the artist's date of date as 1982, but the Independent Administrative Institution National Museum of Art, Japan gives his death date as 1978.

2 Merritt and other sources state that he studied with the nihonga artist Araki Kanpō 荒木寛畝 (1831-1915), rather than Arai Kanpō 荒井寛方 (1878-1945) a nihonga and print artist.