Heihachirō Fukuda (1892–1974) was a painter born in Ōita Prefecture who brought a new sensibility to modern Japanese painting. Having studied at the Kyoto Municipal School of Fine Arts, he created clear, concise compositions characterised by a bold simplification of form and colour, whilst taking familiar elements of nature—such as flowers, bamboo, sweetfish and the water’s surface—as his subjects. Whilst he placed great importance on sketching from life, his distinctive approach lay not in depicting what he saw exactly as it was, but in extracting beautiful colours and compositions from nature and transforming them into concise forms. As seen in his representative work *Ripples*, he established a unique style of Japanese painting characterised by its decorative quality and refreshing sensibility, and was awarded the Order of Culture in 1961.

When viewing Heihachirō Fukuda’s works, an ordinary fragment of nature appears transformed into a surprisingly fresh landscape. By boldly simplifying the ripples of water, rows of bamboo and the colours of flowers, the essence of the subject becomes all the more vivid. His works give the impression that, rather than providing a detailed description of nature, he has refined only the beauty he discovered with his own eyes and captured it on the canvas. Their great appeal lies in the fact that, whilst concise, they possess a rich resonance and have not lost the freshness that resonates with contemporary design to this day.