Generally regarded as being one of the last great masters of ukiyo-e art – “pictures of the floating world” captured in hanging scrolls, woodblock prints and paintings- Tsukioka Yoshitoshi is one of the boldest and most celebrated Japanese artists of the last 200 years. In a tumultuous career in which the artist was well-acquainted with both relative fame as well as crushing obscurity, Yoshitoshi navigated loss, mental illness, and poverty in order to produce works that preserved the rich and vivid tradition of woodblock printing against the encroaching western techniques of ‘modernity’. Prolific, yet met with just as much ambivalence as acclaim, Yoshitoshi’s work has slowly but surely established itself as canonical in the ukiyo-e genre; indeed many modern critics claim that his vision and creativity was instrumental in imparting ukiyo-e with “one last burst of glory”.

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