Fumiko Hori

Hori was born to a scholarly family in Hirakawacho, in Tokyo, Japan, in 1918.^[2][3] In 1940, she graduated from Women's School of Fine Arts (now Joshibi University of Art and Design).^[4][5][6] She trained in Nihonga, a traditional Japanese painting style.^[2] In 1952, she won the Uemura Shōen Award, given to outstanding Japanese female painters.^[7]

In 1960, Hori's husband, a diplomat, died of tuberculosis.^[8] Hori decided to travel the world, leaving Japan for the first time and visiting Egypt, Europe, the United States and Mexico.^[2] Upon her return to Japan, she moved to the Kanagawa countryside^[8] and created works inspired by her travels.^[2] The natural world, including flowers and animals, was a theme of her work throughout her career.^[3][9]

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Hori created illustrations for magazines and children's books,^[2][3] including a 1971 picture book adaption of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker that won an award at the Bologna Children's Book Fair.^[3][10] She also taught painting at Tama Art University.^[9] In 1987, she won the Kanagawa Culture Prize.^[9]

Hori lived in Arezzo, in Tuscany, Italy, for five years from 1987, setting up a studio there and painting colourful images of the local setting.^[8][3] She continued to travel to countries around the world, including such destinations as the Amazon, Nepal, and Mexico.^[8]

In 2000, she survived life-threatening aneurysm; she was inspired by this experience to paint microorganisms, as viewed under a microscope.^[2][8] This work appeared in a solo exhibition at Nakajima Art Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo.^[8] A ceramic piece based on one of her paintings, Utopia, was installed in the lobby of Fukushima Airport in 2014.^[11]

Hori continued to paint into her final years.^[2][7] The Museum of Modern Art in Hayama showed a retrospective of her work from November 2017 to March 2018;^[12] the earliest piece was a self-portrait from 1930, and the most recent piece was Red-Flowering Japanese Apricot, painted in 2016 when Hori was 98 years old.^[2]

Hori died on February 5, 2019, at a hospital in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, at age 100.^[10] The Narukawa Art Museum in Hakone, home of over 100 of her works, hosted a memorial exhibition from July to November 2019.^[13]

• List of Nihonga painters