A World of Edo Art
Tawaraya Sōtatsu (ca. 1570–1643) is in many ways a mystery and very little is known about his life. All we know is that he ran a Kyoto painting shop called Tawaraya that specialized in painted fans in the early seventeenth century and became so well-known for his creative designs that the word "Tawaraya" came to mean fine Kyoto fans. He initially painted primarily for urban commoners and the merchant class, but he was such a popular painter—his dynamism of composition, his design acumen, his use of abstract forms and materials was so remarkable—that he came to the attention of the imperial court, and he became an imperial painter who, by the end of his life, had produced some of the most memorable folding screens that we have from the Edo period.
