Otagaki rengetsu biography templates

Tomioka Tessai富岡 鉄斎 (1837~1924)

By far the most personally and artistically important of all of Rengetsu’s collaborators. We are preparing an elaborate biography which will be posted here by Decmber 2012.

Wada Gozan和田 呉山 (1800~1875)

Gozan was born in Osaka. He became a disciple of the Shijo School painter Mori Tetsuzan (1775-1841) in the line of Muruyama Oukyo. At 42 he lost his wife and became a priest, taking the Buddhist name Gesshin (Moon Mind) and afterward, he became the chief priest of Jinkoin where Rengetsu lived in her later life. During famine, he drew pictures of Kannon and other Bodhisattvas and sold them to provide food to the poor. An artist of extremely wide range, he worked in the lyric style of southern China (nanga), the spare manner of the Shijo painters, the grotesque humor of Otsu-e, and the spare powerful style of Zen painting. Though mainly a painter, he also wrote waka (Japanese poems in the classic 5-7-5-7-7 arrangement of syllables), one of which appears on a collaborative painting in the foundation collection.

Nakajima Raishou中島

Buddhist nun, poet and potter (1791–1875)

In this Japanese name, the surname is Ōtagaki.

Ōtagaki Rengetsu (大田垣 蓮月, 10 February 1791 – 10 December 1875) was a Buddhist nun who is widely regarded to have been one of the greatest Japanese poets of the 19th century. She was also a skilled potter and painter and expert calligrapher.

Biography

She was the daughter of a courtesan and a nobleman. Born into a samurai family with the surname Tōdō, she was adopted at a young age by the Ōtagaki family. She was a lady in waiting at Kameoka Castle from age 7 to 16, when she was married. She was married twice and had five children.

However, her husband died in 1823. She became a Buddhist nun at the age of thirty after burying both husbands, all of her children, her stepmother and stepbrother. Her adoptive father joined her. Ōtagaki joined the temple Chion-in and became a nun, taking Rengetsu ("Lotus Moon") as her Buddhist name. She remained at Chion-in for nearly ten years, and lived in a number of other temples for the following three decades, until 1865, when she settled at the Jinkō-in where she lived out the rest of her life.

Being a woman, she was only allowed to live in a Buddhist monastery for a couple of years. After that she lived in tiny huts and moved around quite a lot. She was a master of martial arts having been trained since childhood by her adoptive family. The Otagaki family were well known as teachers of ninjutsu. She trained in jujutsu, naginatajutsu, kenjutsu, and kusarigama.

Though best known as a waka poet, Rengetsu was also accomplished at dance, sewing, some of the martial arts, and Japanese tea ceremony. She admired and

Rengetsu, poet

Rengetsu’s poetic work is based on an extensive corpus of waka poetry, poems that follow the pattern of thirty-one syllables, structured following the cadence 5-7-5-7-7. Waka poems have a long history in Japan. Their composition requires a solid literary education, based on the use of complex grammar, as well as historical and literary allusions. The words selected and the phrases constructed have many ways of being interpreted and, from this perspective, their interpretation, and translation, depend on context, mood, feelings expressed, subtleties and the way in which all the elements of the poem relate to one another.

Rengetsu, calligrapher

Ōtagaki Rengetsu is considered one of the foremost female calligraphers in the history of Japanese art, especially for her expressiveness, personality, sensitivity, cleanliness, proportion and the perfect composition of her strokes. Many of Rengetsu’s poems are written on tanzaku. It is believed that, during her life, Rengetsu wrote more than 20,000 tanzaku; everyone who visited her took away with them at least one tanzaku, whether they bought one or as a gift for having bought one of her ceramics. Many of these were later mounted onto vertical scrolls in order to be hung and shown in the toko no ma.

Rengetsu, ceramicist

Despite not being a professional ceramicist, Rengetsu created a vast corpus of thousands of ceramics which came from a practice initiated probably in the 1830s in Awataguchi, the main ceramics district of Kyoto. It was there that the basics of the art of ceramics could be observed and learnt. Additionally, to make her ceramics more attractive, to sell them and earn a living, she decided to start decorating them with her own poems, with calligraphy or etched on the surface of bowls, plates, tea pots, censers and all kinds of everyday objects, as well as for the ceremonial practices o

Ōtagaki Rengetsu is perhaps the most famous poet of the 19th century and is also known for her excellent skills in calligraphy and pottery. She was born the illegitimate daughter of a samurai from the Tōdō family. Soon after her birth, she was adopted by Ōtagaki Mitsuhasa, who worked at Chion'in, an important temple of the Jōdo (Pure Land) school in Kyōto. In 1798, after losing her mother and brother, she was sent to serve as a lady-in-waiting at Kameoka Castle in Tanba, where she was taught classical poetry, calligraphy, and martial arts.

At the age of 33, she had already experienced some fateful years in her life, losing two husbands and all five of her children. She then decided to shave her hair and take vows, taking the name Rengetsu (Lotus Moon). She lived with her stepfather near Chion'in Temple. After his death in 1832, Rengetsu began making her extraordinary pottery, which she usually inscribed with her own waka (31-syllable classical poetry) and sold to support herself. With her unique combination of pottery, calligraphy, and poetry, Rengetsu gained recognition far beyond the borders of Kyōto during her lifetime.

The work presented here is a lidded freshwater jar for the Japanese tea ceremony. Despite her tragic life, the work exemplifies the subtle beauty and humor that Rengetsu was able to maintain for herself. In the incised poem - also known as the Eggplant Poem - she links the image of a ripe eggplant to the Buddhist concept of a fulfilled and happy life:

"To rise in the world and achieve what one desires, therefore, eggplants are indeed a happy example" (Yo no naka ni/ mi no nari idete/ omou koto/ nasu ha medetaki/ tameshi narikeri).

The jar is accompanied by an old wooden box. This work is almost identical to a water jar in the Unger Family Collection, Switzerland, published in the exhibition catalogue Black Robe, White Mist: Art of the Japanese Buddhist Nun Rengetsu, National Gallery of Australia (2007), p. 94.

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