Kawanabe Kyōsai

Kyōsai was sent to study under Kuniyoshi at about seven years old, then moved to the formal Kanō school — so he holds both the popular print tradition and the classical one, and moved between them all his life.

He worked through the collapse of the shogunate and the opening of Japan to the West, and his satire was pointed enough that he was arrested for it. He painted publicly at parties, often drunk, at speed and at scale, and much of his reputation rests on that performance as much as on the results.

The crows are the exception — small, spare, almost nothing on the page, and the work he was most respected for in his own time.

Biography compiled from the artist's Wikidata entity and English Wikipedia article (linked above). Work-level facts — title, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance — come from the catalogue record of the institution holding each print, cited on the individual work. Public domain status is asserted by the holding institution; Australian copyright independently verified as life + 70 years from the artist's Wikidata death date. Wikipedia ↗