The Ikegami Hyakutaketei Collection is a collection of works by the Matsumoto City writer Kisaku Ikegami (pen name Hyakutaketei,1890-1978) mainly collects modern literary materials. This is a collection of 211 pieces. This time, we will mainly introduce Ogawa Senyo's work "Shin-Otsu-e of Western Genre Scenes".

Ogawa Sen’yo (1882‐1971) was a painter in the western and Japanese styles, a Buddhist painter and a cartoonist, active from the later Meiji era into Showa. Born in Kyoto, he was initially apprenticed to a Buddhist painter but from 1902 studied western painting under Asai Chu and also began to work in Japanese painting. In 1910, he moved to Tokyo and became popular for his illustrations and cartoons in magazines such as Hototogisu and Taiyo (The Sun). Later he dedicated himself to Japanese painting and in his final years specialized in Nanga, literati painting.

In XNUMX, Sen’yo traveled to France, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and other countries. Shin-Otsu-e of Western Genre Scenes is a selection of paintings of the scenes he’d seen while in Europe done after returning to Japan. Otsu-e is a kind of folk painting that was sold in the Otsu area of Shiga Prefecture during the Edo Period. Sen’yo hand-tinted the woodblock prints, creating a set of twenty of them.

Enjoy these unfettered and humorous pieces of art along with the explanations Sen’yo provided on each piece.

• List of works