Koryūsai

He became a masterless rōnin after the death of the head of the clan and moved to Edo (modern Tokyo) where he settled near Ryōgoku Bridge in the Yagenbori area.

[2] In 1782, Koryūsai applied for and received the Buddhist honour hokkyō ("Bridge of the Law")[1] from the imperial court[3] and thereafter used the title as part of his signature.

[4] The first ukiyo-e histories written in the West in the 19th century elevated certain artists as exemplars; Koryūsai's work came to be seen as too indebted to Harunobu, who died in 1770, and inferior to that of Kiyonaga, whose peak period came in the 1880s.

[3] An example is Woldemar von Seidlitz's Geschichte des japanischen Farbenholzschnittes ("History of Japanese colour prints", 1897), the most popular of the early ukiyo-e histories, which paints Koryūsai as a successor to Harunobu and a rival of Kiyonaga in the 1770s who slipped into mediocrity and imitation of his rival by the end of the decade.

[5] Interest lay mainly in the details of Koryūsai's life—a samurai who received court honours was unusual in the proletarian world of ukiyo-e.[3] In 2021, contemporary woodblock printmaker David Bull created a series of 12 prints depicting nature scenes adapted from Koryūsai's designs.