Anonymous folk painters
Otsu-e painters
大津絵 (Otsu-e)
Anonymous roadside painters whose quick, funny pictures travelers carried home.
On Picturepops™ cards · 0
Their first cards are on the way.
The life
about 1620s to late 19th century (the tradition)Born Otsu, Omi Province (now Shiga Prefecture), Japan
Otsu-e (大津絵), pictures from Otsu, were folk paintings made from about the 1620s-1640s in and around Otsu, on Lake Biwa near Kyoto, where the great Tokaido road passed. Families painted them quickly on cheap paper, using woodblock outlines, compasses and a few bold colors, and sold them at roadside stalls to travelers as souvenirs and charms. The painters did not sign their work, and their names are lost. Early pictures showed Buddhist figures; later came folk subjects with a joke or a moral, such as a demon dressed as a monk begging for alms, or the thunder god fishing for his lost drum. The trade faded when the railway replaced travel on foot. Picturepops cards use an 18th-century Otsu-e of a demon reciting Buddhist prayers.