Satake Yoshiatsu

Biography

Satake Yoshiatsu was the eldest son of Satake Yoshiharu and was born at the domain's Edo residence. He became daimyō on his father's death in 1758. He was received in formal audience by Shogun Tokugawa Ieharu in 1763 and made his first visit to his domain in 1765. The domain had been devastated by years of crop failures, peasant uprisings, plots among his retainers and fiscal mismanagement by his predecessors. Yoshiatsu sought to escape this reality through art, and was a member of a painting coterie which included fellow daimyō Yamauchi Toyochika of Tosa Domain and Shimazu Shigehide of Satsuma Domain. At the time, the Kanō school of painting was considered orthodoxy, and painting was regarded as a "gentleman's hobby"; however, Yoshiatsu devoted all of his time and efforts into painting, developing a new style which combined western techniques with Japanese themes. Along with his retainer Odano Naotake, he produced a number of paintings in the Dutch style and in 1778, he wrote the Gahō Kōryō (画 法 綱領), the first work on western painting to be written in Japan. He was also a student of rangaku (Dutch studies) scholar Hiraga Gennai, whom he had invited to Akita to advise him on management of the domain's copper mines (Akita was the primary source of copper in the Japanese archipelago during this period).

He died in 1785, at the young age of 38. He was married to a daughter of Yamauchi Toyonobu of Tosa Domain and at least three concubines, by whom he had four sons and six daughters.

References

• "Akita ranga" at JAANUS. Accessed 16 May 2007.
• Frederic, Louis (2002). "Satake Shozan." Japan Encyclopedia. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Tazawa, Yutaka: Satake Shozan. In: Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Art. Kodansha International, 1981. .
• Laurance P. Roberts: Shozan. In: A Dictionary of Japanese Artists. Weatherhill, 1976. .