The Banishing of TAGA Choko

This work was entered in the first Teiten (Imperial Art Exhibition). TAGA Choko was an Edo-period artist, also known as HANABUSA Itcho, who earned the displeasure of the government in 1698 and was banished to Miyake Island. In this painting, Terukata focuses not on Itcho as he sailed away, but rather on the crowd who had gathered to see him off. Starting with an old weeping man on left-hand screen and continuing through to a woman watching surreptitiously from behind a curtain, the picture depicts nineteen people, men and women, young and old, dramatically. In addition to the gestures and features of each of the people, their clothes and ornaments are also depicted with great care, the vibrancy of the work making it a typical Teiten entry.
IKEDA Terukata was born in Tokyo, studied under MIZUNO Toshikata, and was particularly skilled at genre painting. He joined the Ugo-kai, which was formed in 1901 and married his fellow student, SAKAKIBARA Shoen, who also specialized in genre painting. He exhibited magnificent screens depicting customs of the Edo or contemporary period in the Bunten, but this screen, that he showed in the first Teiten, was to be the last of his large-scale works as he died in 1921, aged 39.