Isson Tanaka (1908-77) was deemed a painting prodigy on winning a children's art competition at age 7. By age 50, however, his career had slowly gone nowhere.

Giving up his Tokyo environs, he burned his numerous sketchbooks, sold his houseand headed south to Amami Oshima Island, Kagoshima Prefecture, in the Ryukyu island chain. He lived in near poverty, minimally supporting himself by dyeing fabrics, as he developed a brightly colored painting style known as Southern Rinpa that posthumously captured the nation's heart.

Isson was trained by his sculptor father in the indigenized Chinese aesthetics of literati painting known as nanga. In 1926, he attended the Tokyo Fine Arts School (now Tokyo University of the Arts), where his classmates included the luminary postwar painters-to-be Kaii Higashiyama and Meiji Hashimoto, but dropped out after a couple of months owing to family issues. Thereupon, he pursued individual study, deepening his knowledge of Chinese poetry and calligraphy, and following the creative leads of Shanghai School painters, such as Wu Changshuo (1844-1927), whose influences are visible in "Gourds" (1926), one of Isson's paintings on display at the Sagawa Art Museum's current exhibition.