Yamakawa Shūhō
Japan1898-1944
Yamakawa Shūhō was a Kyoto-born painter and printmaker who worked across the Taishō and early Shōwa periods, active in both Nihonga painting and the Shin-hanga print movement. Born Yamakawa Yoshio, he took his artist name from his first teacher, Ikegami Shūhō, and later trained under Kiyokata Kaburagi, one of the era's leading figures in images of women. From the late 1920s Yamakawa turned to woodblock print design, producing bijin-ga—portraits of contemporary women—many issued by the publisher Shōzaburō Watanabe, a central figure in the Shin-hanga revival. Alongside this print work he continued to paint and, in the 1930s, worked as an illustrator. He died in 1944 of a cerebral hemorrhage. His paintings and prints are held today in museum collections including the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Museum of World Cultures, and Bryn Mawr College.
