21 Facts About Kobayashi Kiyochika

Kobayashi Kiyochika was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, best known for his colour woodblock prints and newspaper illustrations.

Kobayashi Kiyochika's father was Kobayashi Mohe, who worked as a minor official in charge of unloading rice collected as taxes.

Kobayashi Kiyochika returned by land to Edo and re-entered the employ of the shogun.

Kobayashi Kiyochika returned to the renamed Tokyo in May 1873 with his mother, who died there that September.

Kobayashi Kiyochika's house burned down in the Great Fire at Ryogoku of 26 January 1881 while he was out sketching.

Demand for his prints decreased in the 1880s and Kobayashi Kiyochika turned to comic images for newspapers.

Kobayashi Kiyochika continued to produce prints, but at a less frequent pace.

Kobayashi Kiyochika produced a number of prints depicting scenes from the Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War, collaborating with caption writer Koppi Dojin, penname of Nishimori Takeki, to contribute a number of illustrations to the propaganda series Nihon banzai hyakusen hyakusho.

Thereafter the print market shrank, and Kobayashi Kiyochika's wife opened a business selling fans and postcards to help support them.

Kobayashi Kiyochika produced only eighteen triptychs and a few comic prints, of generally lower quality than his earlier prints.

Kobayashi Kiyochika spent July to October 1915 in Nagano Prefecture and visited the Asama Onsen hot springs in Matsumoto to treat his rheumatism.

On 28 November 1915 Kobayashi Kiyochika died at his Tokyo home in Nakazato, Kita Ward.

Kobayashi Kiyochika depicted foreigners as foolish and whose inexpensive modern wares he presented as aesthetically inferior to traditional domestic ones.

Kobayashi Kiyochika depicts the Russians as cowardly buffoons in his caricatures from the Russo-Japanese War period; generally they are of lower quality than his earlier cartoons.

Kobayashi Kiyochika's prints show a concern with light and shadow, most likely an influence of the Western-style painting that came in vogue in Japan in the 1870s.

Kobayashi Kiyochika used a subdued palette in his prints without the harsher aniline dyes that had come into use earlier in the century.

Kobayashi Kiyochika's specialty was night scenes illuminated by sources within the composition, such as by lamps.

Kobayashi Kiyochika employed Western-style geometric perspective, volumetric modeling, and chiaroscuro to a degree that distinguishes his work from the majority of his ukiyo-e predecessors.

Kobayashi Kiyochika is one of the artists not known to have produced any erotic art.

Richard Lane wrote that Kobayashi Kiyochika could represent "either the last important ukiyo-e master, or the first noteworthy print artist of modern Japan", but that "it is probably most accurate to regard him as an anachronistic survival from an earlier age, a minor hero whose best efforts to adapt ukiyo-e to the new world of Meiji Japan were not quite enough".

Kobayashi Kiyochika considered Kiyochika's best works to fall short of Hiroshige's greatest, but to be on par with the best of Kuniyoshi and Kunisada.