Soga Shohaku (1730 - 1881). Soga Shohaku was a Japanese painter of the middle Edo period. Soga Shohaku, actually Miura Sakonjiro, was probably the son of a merchant family in Kyoto who ran a business called Tamba-ya or Tango-ya. He seems to have been born in the province of Ise. He studied painting under Takada Keiho, a student of Kano Eino, then came under the influence of the Unkoku school. However, his real admiration was the painter Soga Dasoku from the Muromachi period and the painter Soga Chokuan from the Momoyama period. He called himself Dasoku 10th and signed his work with the seal Dasokken. When Shohaku was in his early thirties, he made various trips to the Ise area. Some of the works he created during this period, such as the painting of sliding doors in Sairai-ji and Tennen-ji in the city of Tsu, have been lost, but others, such as the paintings in Keisho-ji and Choden-ji in Matsusaka and those for the Nagashima family in Saigū have been preserved. It was the time when Sohaku had reached the full height of his work. He used eccentric deformations, strong colors and strong contrasts of brightness. His brushwork was rough, but not clumsy, and also shows a timeless sense of humor. In his later years, his work had a certain formalism; overall, his works showed almost constant quality. Then Shohaku, however, by no means justified, lost recognition and was considered a second-class artist. In recent years, Shohaku has received increasing attention in the western world, especially in America, due to its great expressiveness and the skillful use of traditional techniques. Shohaku's best-known works include the two-part screen, which represents the eccentric monk couple Hanshan and Shide, the screens Meeting of the Immortals in private ownership and the screen Demon under a willow owned by the Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts owns a number of Sogas works, including the sliding doors, which are painted with the theme dragons and clouds. Soga Shohaku was buried in Kosho-ji in Kyoto.