Odano Naotake

(b Kakunodate, Akita Prefect., 1749; d 1780). Japanese painter. A samurai retainer of the daimyo of Akita Province (now Prefect.), Satake Shozan, Naotake received his early artistic training in the Kano school. In the summer of 1773 he met HIRAGA GENNAI, a natural scientist and student of Western learning (Rangakusha), who had been invited to Akita by Shozan to reopen the domain's copper mine. During Gennai's visit Naotake began to study Western painting methods. In December of that year, at the behest of Shozan, he travelled to Edo (now Tokyo) to continue his study with Gennai, in whose household he resided for the next five years. Although Naotake remained in close contact with Shozan, acting as his painting teacher and artistic collaborator, the focus of his life now shifted to Edo. In addition to his study with Gennai, Naotake came into contact with another advocate of Western empiricism, the physician Sugita Genpaku (1733-1817). In 1774 he provided the illustrations for Kaitai shinsho, Genpaku's translation of a Dutch text on dissection, Tafel anatomia (Amsterdam, 1734), the first translation of a Western scientific treatise to be published in Japan. Through Gennai, he may have met the painter SO SHISEKI, illustrator of Gennai's magnum opus, the Butsurui hinshitsu ('Classification of various materials'; 1763), and master of the delicately detailed bird-and-flower (kacho) painting introduced to Japan by the Chinese painter SHEN NANPIN. Naotake drew on all these influences to create the Akita school of painting (Akita Ranga), which blended Western techniques of linear and aerial perspective and chiaroscuro with the decorative realism of Chinese bird-and-flower painting, all executed in the traditional Japanese medium of water-based mineral pigments on silk or paper (see also JAPAN,

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