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Maruyama Ōkyo 円山応挙
Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795) was the most popular painter of the late eighteenth century. At a time when many more Japanese people were beginning to commission and own artworks, he made paintings that were more accessible for the expanding pictorial culture of the period. Ōkyo is closely associated with the concept of realism, or shasei, an old concept that means to paint directly from nature. In terms of shasei, Ōkyo was particularly interested in studying classical Chinese painters who practiced a kind of “magic realism,” where the goal was attempting to replicate the surface forms of a motif with such exactitude that it also conveyed a kind of inner life.
