Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Kuniyoshi was the son of a silk dyer and trained under Toyokuni alongside Kunisada, then spent close to a decade struggling for work. He was nearly thirty when a series of warrior prints for the Suikoden — a Chinese bandit epic hugely popular in Japan — made his name almost overnight.

He is the loudest hand in the Utagawa school. Where Hiroshige is weather and Kunisada is the theatre, Kuniyoshi is scale and violence: tattooed heroes, whales, skeletons rendered several sheets wide, compositions that run across three or five panels and treat the joins as part of the drawing.

He also worked under a censorship regime that banned depictions of current politics, and produced satire that technically depicted nothing of the kind — historical scenes and animal caricatures whose targets were obvious to everyone.

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 ↗