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Catalogue No: KT/Bio

Kitano Tsunetomi was a well known bijin-ga printmaker and painter. His woodblock prints have a painterly quality, and look very similar to the scroll paintings on which they were based. In 1880, he was born in Kanazawa with the name Tomitaro. As a young man, Tsunetomi worked as an apprentice to a woodblock carver after which he became a print carver for the newspaper Hokkoku Shinpo. He later moved to Osaka to study nihon-ga style painting under Inano Toshitsune, a student of Yoshitoshi. In 1901, he began working as an illustrator for the newspaper Osaka Shinbun.
Beginning in 1910, Tsunetomi began to exhibit paintings in the Bunten shows, and he won a prize in the 5th Bunten (1911) for his bijin-ga painting ‘Rain during Sunshine’. He published a folio of four prints in 1918 titled ‘Seasons in the Licensed Quarter’ (Kuruwa no shunju). These designs were self-carved and printed. 1923 he produced the woodblock print of ‘the Heroine Umegawa’ for the print supplement to ‘The Complete Works of the Chickamatsu’. In 1924, Tsunetomi founded an art school and publishing house called Hakuyodo. His students included the bijin-ga artists Kitani Chigusa and Shima Seien. His most important woodblock print ‘Heron Maiden’ was published around 1925