Japanese painter, Ogura Yuki (1895 – 2000) is known in particular for his bijin-ga, his portraits of women.
Teacher
Mizoguchi Yuki – she will become Ogura Yuki through marriage – was born on March 1, 1895 in Ōtsu in Shiga prefecture, on the island of Honshū in Japan, near Kyoto. She grew up in the middle of the Meiji era, a historical period in Japan marked by the end of the policy of isolation, a global modernization of the country and an expansionist policy.
The young girl studies at the Nara Women's Normal School, which will become Nara Women's University, to become a teacher. After graduating, she never lost her great interest in art and, from 1920, studied with the painter Yasuda Yukihiko. He introduced him to painting and to the nihonga movement, which appeared in the 1880s and aimed to take up traditional Japanese conventions and techniques, with innovations and novelties.
painter of bijin-ga
Ogura Yuki embarked very seriously on nihonga painting. In 1926, Nihon Bijutsuin (Japanese Art Institute), which supports nihonga art, selects his painting Kyuri (cucumber) for one of its biannual exhibitions. For the young woman, it is the beginning of recognition. A prolific painter, she set up her studio in Kamakura, a city on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, 50 km southwest of Tokyo.
Faithful to the nihonga genre, Ogura Yuki specializes in still lifes and floral compositions, scenes of family life and especially bijin-ga, portraits of beautiful women. In the 1950s and 1960s, she produced many large portraits of family members and friends. Ogura Yuki combines in his art a great respect for the nihonga movement and traditional Japanese painting with a certain modernity in style, composition and subject. His paintings are soft, colorful and full of life.
In 1976, in recognition of her work as an artist, Ogura Yuki was named a member of the Japanese Academy of Arts (Nihon Geijitsu-in); she will thereafter be honorary president. In 1980, thirty-two years after Uemura Shōen – another bijin-ga painter – she was the second woman to receive the Order of Culture.
Ogura Yuki died at the age of 105, in July 2000, in his home in Kamakura.