Tetsu Fusen (1891-1976) was regarded as an unusual though gifted painter in his own time. In the decades since, however, he has largely been forgotten, mostly known to specialists or devoted connoisseurs of his technically brilliant, imaginative and emotional landscapes.

Much of his work was at least semi-autobiographical, filled with memories of places of his youth, family and friends, and treasured objects. His pictorial homage "Old Bicycle" (1968) is filled with an ode-like inscription as if his bicycle were a dear friend in possession of the profound secrets of shared experience. For the first time in 21 years, Nara Prefectural Museum of Art is providing a comprehensive opportunity to engage with Fusen's unconventional career.

Fusen was born to a Buddhist priest in Koishikawa in Tokyo, and was sent by his father to a temple in a small fishing village near Chiba for Buddhist training at age 10. Moving back to Tokyo to attend school, his interest in art, however, trumped his father's expectations for him in the priesthood. In 1914, he became a research member of the Japan Art Institute, and then he spent three years working himself out of impoverished circumstances as a fisherman on the remote island of Izu Oshima, southwest of Tokyo. Those experiences — the sea, its rhythmic movements and abundant creatures, poetically sentimental minka farmhouses and small village life — and an indigenized Chinese literati style of painting that combined idealized pictorial worlds in ink with self-expressive verse, characterized Fusen's early output.