Biography

Ukiyo-e artist. Born in Edo (Tokyo). He is said to have studied oil painting from English artist Charles Wirgman, who lived in Yokohama. In 1876, he published landscape prints that utilized “kosen-ga” (light-ray pictures), which incorporated light and the shifting of light, through adopting expressions found in photography, painting and Japanese-style painting. This style brought a new perspective into the ukiyo-e world of the Meiji era (1868-1912). He then took interest in journalism, due to the rise of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement. In 1881, he began to publish a series of ponchi-e, which consisted of satirical cartoons on society. He then studied copper-plate printmaking and lithography, which led to him becoming recognized as having created a path from the medium of ukiyo-e to the creative print, which adopted the idea of a work “self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed” by a single artist, rather than incorporating the collaborative process undertaken by traditional ukiyo-e printmaking.