Soga Chokuan

Soga Chokuan (died after 1610, Sakai?, Japan) was a Japanese painter who specialized in bird-and-flower pictures and founded the Soga family of artists. He is especially noted as a painter of fowl (as his son Chokuan II was noted as a painter of falcons). His brightly coloured, realistic bird-and-flower screen paintings are in the Hōki Temple on Mount Kōya, the Daitoku Temple in Kyōto, and the Tokyo National Museum. He also did Chinese-style, or suiboku (“water-ink”), paintings executed rapidly with a stiff brush on screens, such as “The Four Grayhairs and Three Laughers” (Henjōkō Temple, Mount Kōya).