Sadao Watanabe

Sadao Watanabe (1913 – 1996) was baptized a Christian at age 17. He quickly combined his new faith with an interest in preserving the traditional Japanese folk art of stencil dying, called katazome. Over time Watanabe came to be Japan’s leading artist to portray biblical scenes. While his work was well received in his homeland, it was also highly regarded internationally as evidenced by art exhibitions at leading institutions such as the British Museum, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and the Vatican Museum. Watanabe’s fame notwithstanding, the artist’s chief desire was to create art that could be enjoyed by common people and displayed in ordinary settings. With this goal in view he chose scenes from the Bible as his primary subject matter in order to communicate the truth of Scripture in the Japanese context.