Born in Koga, Shimōsa Province (now Koga, Ibaraki), a son of Kawanabe Kiemon, a samurai of Koga domain. The next year his father was posted to Edo, and the family moved there. From early childhood Kyōsai loved to draw, and he is said to have gazed intently at the movements of living creatures and sketched them.
As a small child he became a pupil of the ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi and received his first lessons. Kuniyoshi was a popular painter of warrior prints and caricatures who loved free and bold expression. Kyōsai's lifelong sense of humor and power in painting is said to have sprouted under Kuniyoshi.
Partly at his father's wish, he left Kuniyoshi and became a pupil of Maemura Tōwa of the Kanō school, the line of the shogunate's official painters, later studying under Kanō Tōhaku. The Kanō school demanded rigorous training in copying old masterpieces again and again, and Kyōsai acquired a sure brush and a wide range of techniques.
He completed his training in the Kanō school and was granted the art name Tōiku Noriyuki, a sign that he was recognized as a full-fledged painter. But Kyōsai was not bound only by Kanō conventions; he took in ukiyo-e and the techniques of other schools, seeking a style all his own.
From around this time he called himself Kyōsai with the character for "mad," and drew many caricatures, satirical pictures and color prints for townspeople, becoming popular. His pictures, which drew ghosts and animals as if they were humans and poked fun at the world, entertained people in the uneasy last years of the Edo period.
At a painting and calligraphy gathering, a picture he drew while drunk was judged to mock officials of the new government, and he was arrested and jailed for a time. After his release the following year, he changed the character "mad" in his art name to "dawn," and from then on signed himself Kyōsai with that character.
For the Shintomiza kabuki theater in Tokyo, he painted a huge stage curtain about seventeen meters wide, depicting actors in the guise of ghosts and monsters. It is said he finished it in just a few hours, and it is known as a work showing the speed and boldness of his brush.
His "Crow on a Withered Branch," shown at the Second National Industrial Exhibition, won the highest prize for painting. The fact that Kyōsai priced the work at one hundred yen, a very high sum at the time, caused a stir, and it became known as "the hundred-yen crow." Kyōsai is said to have explained that the price was for his many years of training.
The British architect Josiah Conder, who designed the Rokumeikan and other buildings, became Kyōsai's pupil and was given the name Kyōei. Conder traveled with Kyōsai, eagerly studied his way of painting, and later introduced Kyōsai's art abroad. Kyōsai's works came to be highly valued in Europe and America as well.
He published the Kyōsai Gadan, which set out how he had learned to paint and his techniques. Illustrated with pictures, it describes his youthful training under Kuniyoshi and in the Kanō school and the methods of many schools, conveying to us today Kyōsai's earnest attitude toward painting.
He died of a stomach illness in Tokyo. It is said he never let go of his brush and kept painting even on his sickbed. His daughter Kyōsui also became a painter and carried on her father's style. Kyōsai, who learned from both the Kanō school and ukiyo-e and left paintings full of humor and power, has in recent years drawn renewed attention in Japan and abroad.
Utagawa KuniyoshiJosiah Conder
Soejima TaneomiNishi AmaneYuri KimimasaŌkubo ToshimichiNakamura MasanaoTerashima MunenoriKido TakayoshiŌtori Keisuke
People of the Meiji period ・ People by period
Based on facts found in textbooks and biographies. Uncertain points are marked as such.