Katsushika Ōi


Katsushika Ōi, also known as Ei, was a Japanese Ukiyo-e artist of the late 19th century Edo period. Her mother was the second wife of Hokusai. Ōi was an accomplished painter who also worked as a production assistant to her father.

Biography

Ōi's birth and death dates are not known. She was a daughter of the ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai was married twice; the first marriage produced a son and two daughters, and the second, to a woman named Koto, resulted in a son and one or two daughters. It is said that Ōi was born in Hokusai's 37th year: Kansei 12.
Ōi married the artist Minamisawa Tōmei in. They did not get along, and she found him a comically poor artist. They divorced about 1827; she returned to her father's home and never remarried. Ōi thereafter assisted Hokusai in his artwork and took to producing her own. Of her bijin-ga portraits of beauties Hokusai is said to have told people, "The bijin-ga I paint myself are no match for Oei's." Ōi's mother died in. Ōi's whereabouts and status become unknown within a few years of her father's death in 1849.
Ōi not only shared the artistic talent of her father, but also his characteristic of a free spirit. Both of them did not care about material wealth and keeping up with housework. Ōi and her father painted all day, and as neither one cooked they would go to a nearby market and buy prepared food. After a while when it became too unsuitable to live, they would go and find another place to live.
Of the testimony that remains about Ōi, Tsuyuki Iitsu, a pupil of Hokusai's in the master's later years, described her as having an eccentric personality like her father and a charitable disposition—she had ambitions to become a female xian sage.

Works

Ōi is known to have excelled at handwriting and in bijin-ga paintings of beautiful women. The following is a selected list of her works.
She has also been credited as an illustrator for the following books.
Aside from drawing and painting, Ōi also made keshi ningyō dolls and sold them to earn a living.

Legacy

Few of Ōi's works are known: amongst them, a few nikuhitsu-ga paintings, the illustrations to the book Onna Chōhō-ki by Takai Ranzan, and no prints.
Canadian novelist Katherine Govier wrote a first-person novel about Ōi titled The Ghost Brush.
The story of Ōi was adapted to comics as Miss Hokusai, which had an animated movie adaptation in 2015. The story tells of the outspoken O-Ei, daughter of the famed artist Tetsuzō, for whom she sometimes paints uncredited. The film won numerous awards.
Katsushika Ōi also appears in Fate/Grand Order as a Foreigner-class Servant, along with Katsushika Hokusai.
Makate Asai based her novel on the life of Ōi; it was published in 2016 after serialization in 2014–15, and an NHK television adaptation of it titled Kurara: Hokusai no Musume appeared in 2017, starring Aoi Miyazaki.