Ogura Yonesuke Itoh

United States·1870-1940

Ogura Yonesuke Itoh arrived in Hawaii around 1895, at the age of twenty-five, after jumping ship from Japan and hiding from immigration authorities in Punchbowl Crater. He remained in the islands and became part of Hawaii's volcano school, the loose circle of landscape painters drawn to the fiery spectacle of Kilauea and its surrounding terrain. Itoh is regarded as the first ethnically Japanese painter of any real stature to take up Hawaiian subject matter, and his canvases sit close in style to those of Jules Tavernier, the school's best-known figure — close enough that several of Itoh's unsigned works have been mistaken for Tavernier's own. He left many paintings unsigned, likely a consequence of his precarious, undocumented status on the islands. Itoh died in 1940. The Honolulu Museum of Art holds examples of his work and typically keeps one on view alongside other volcano school painters.