By Felice Fischer
Yale, $75

Sumptuous is not the word for this huge volume devoted to a husband-and-wife pair of artists. With its beautifully reproduced assortment of scrolls, painted fans, screens and calligraphy in a variety of styles—some of which are shown as fold-outs—it is eye candy for the aficionado and casual gazer alike. Published in conjunction with an exhibition that runs through July 22 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the book also features biographies of the artists and scholarly essays by Fischer and others that place the paintings in the context of Japanese cultural history.

In Kyoto, where he lived and worked, Ike Taiga (1723–76) was known as a genial eccentric, as indifferent to etiquette and convention as he was attentive to his art and his friends. At that time, Kyoto was heavily influenced by Chinese culture, and Taiga’s landscape paintings and calligraphy conform to the tastes of Chinese literati. In common with many artists of the day, Taiga did not draw a firm distinction between the visual arts and poetry, which he read and wrote in a convivial group called the “Chaos Poetry Society.”

This book breaks new ground with the attention it gives to Taiga’s talented wife, Tokuyama Gyokuran (1728–1784). An unusually successful woman in a male-dominated feudal society, she achieved renown as a painter—in a style more baroque and elaborate than Taiga’s—and as a poet. There seems to have been no rivalry between the two; Fischer’s description of their pleasantly informal home evokes an 18th-century Japanese bohemia where husband and wife plunked away on the shamisen and koto in impromptu duets when they weren’t painting and writing poetry together.