Ito Jakuchu was a Japanese painter of the mid-Tokugawa period (1603–1867) who excelled in drawing flowers, fish, and birds, especially fowl, which he used to keep at his home in order to observe them closely.

Jakuchu was born into a family of well-to-do merchants who owned a wholesale greengrocery business in the Nishiki district of Kyoto. As the eldest son, he was expected to succeed his father, but contemporary accounts reveal that painting was the young Jakuchu's only real interest, and that his reclusive temperament made him ill-suited for business. The early death of Jakuchu's father, however, forced him to assume the headship of the family and business at the age of 23.

He first studied drawing with a painter of the Kano school (stressing Chinese subject matter and techniques). Jakuchu had radically different artistic visions; he is generally classified as eccentrics (Kijin), individuals whose personalities and activities transcend the boundaries of normal behavior.

Ito Jakuchu's works in colors and ink monochrome juxtapose barnyard flows, vegetables, flowers, and trees in elegant distortion, combining foreshortening and perspective techniques with a flat, highly chromatic use of ink and brilliant colors. He turned his animal paintings into still-lifes with a sharp wit, posturing the figures in an exaggerated manner, comically suggesting human behaviors.

Jakuchu enjoyed a revival in popularity since the special exhibition at the Kyoto National Museum, Jakuchu: On the 200th Anniversary of the Artist's Death, held in 2000. During Jakuchu's lifetime, he was said to have told a priest that his works would only be understood two hundred years after him. If he truly said this, then his words have been realized. Jakuchu's works now often appear in textbooks and in video clips, and most recently, as designs on beverage bottles.