[2] In July 1875, he began his education at the Koromo School in Japan, and in 1880 started to study Bunjinga with his brother under Tamegai Chikko until graduating in October 1883.

From August 1884, he taught at the Otani School in Chita-gun, resigning in the autumn of that year, when he was adopted into the Isogai family (who were distant relatives), changing his name to Makino Yoshio.

In 1890, he borrowed money from his sister (then Fujishima Kyo), so he could stay in Yokohama with his cousin Hotta Maki, graduating that summer from Nagoya Eiwa.

Markino was curious about, and attracted to, Western culture and in 1893, aged 24, he obtained a travel permit to the United States to study.

Through a letter of introduction to the Japanese Consul of San Francisco, he gained assistance from Suzuki Utsujirō who encouraged Markino to pursue his artistic career.

[3] In June 1897, after being introduced by correspondence with Sakurai Shozo to Hayashi Tadamasa, a Paris-based Japanese art dealer, he travelled to New York, where in August he met Miyake Katsumi (a yoga style painter) at the Japan Assembly Hall.

He experienced limited opportunities based on his societal status, and difficulty finding decent employers, working as a house-boy for a dollar and a half a day.

[6] Speaking to the reporter Frank Harris on religious intolerance, he noted 'the Christian hypocrisy is far worse in America than in England.

By December, Markino had decided to move to London on the advice of Ide Umataro, who he had met during his time studying art.

From 1898, he began working in the Japanese Naval Inspector's Office in London by day and studying at the South Kensington College of Science by night.

Although given £30 severance pay to cover the return fare to Japan, Markino decided to stay in London where he spent most of his subsequent life and career.

Wilson promised to introduce Markino to Charles Holmes, the editor of The Studio[11], who was also known to be fond of the vogue for Japanese woodcuts.

1912 was to prove his most productive period of writing, with the publication of My Idealed John Bullesses, When I was a Child, and The Charm of London [15], followed in 1913 by Recollections and Reflections of a Japanese Artist.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Markino stopped sketching outdoors due to restrictions imposed on foreign nationals by the British government, and took up the study of English literature, philosophy, Greek and Latin.

[16] From 1918 he continued to write, paint and lecture, although his popularity had started to wane with the death of influential friends in World War I.

In Boston, Markino lectured on Eastern and Western philosophy, and on social issues, including racial discrimination, likely recounting many of his negative experiences in San Francisco during his first stay in America.

He managed to set up another exhibition and sell his watercolours, but due to his time away from the literary scene, he was regarded as outdated and started to live a bohemian lifestyle with English and Japanese friends from then on.

In that year, artworks belonging to the noted collector Kojirō Matsukata, including several paintings by Markino, were lost in a fire while in storage in London.

Blacker described Markino as walking up a set of temple steps, in 'a shirt covered in smears of blue and green paint ... a sketchbook in his hand' rambling for almost four hours in English and Japanese rushing up the steps out of breath aged 83 noting 'how happy he had been in London, and that he had never wanted to leave [as] he had so many friends, and was never tired of sketching the people and painting the mists.

Among his friends and acquaintances were the writers Yone Noguchi who introduced him to Arthur Ransome, M. P. Shiel, and the artist Pamela Colman Smith.

Although unnamed, he plays an important role in Ransome's Bohemia in London, and is considered to have been the model for the male protagonist in Shiel's book The Yellow Wave (1905) – a Romeo and Juliet-type tragic romance on the background of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.

His 'Idealised John Bullesses' and biographies frequently note his interactions with, and support for, women's marches and suffragettes like Christabel Pankhurst.

[22] Another friend, Flora Roscoe; an Englishwoman who lived in the hamlet of Wedhampton; knowing how Markino had a hatred of business (something which he believed the English took too seriously) invited him in 1912 to stay to sketch the area, later travelling to Salisbury.

Directed by Vladimir Rosing, the season included the first performance by the Japanese singer, Tamaki Miura as Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly.

Markino was a popular member of a significant group of expatriate Japanese artists working in London, including Urushibara Mokuchu, Ishibashi Kazunori, Hara Busho and Matsuyama Ryuson.

Proper name for me is an art lover.On his Whitechapel exhibit in 1910 the critic and Japanese art specialist Laurence Binyon criticized 'the ever popular colours, "best known and most prized in Europe, while ... the least valued in Japan' present in the watercolours based on dispelling the notion of the time which Oscar Wilde called in his 'The Decay of Lying' essay 'pure invention', Binyon was dissuaded by the toned down colour pallette which pandered to Europeans, instead wishing that 'a loan exhibition may be formed which shall at least adumbrate the range and history of [Japanese] art'.

[8] Markino himself often enjoyed the wet and fog of London street scenes (both popular Japanese motifs) and the paintings of J.M.W.

[30] The silk veil technique Markino learned in California was used to present the ebb and flow of the heavy fogs of London from the factories of the Industrial Revolution of multifarious tones and colour, which London residents described as pea-soupers when the air would turn yellow and green and 'stick' to shiny surfaces like window panes.

He would use the plein air technique, or memory (a more common Japanese tradition) to sketching, noting 'I always work work out entirely from the impression I get on the street so that sometimes it looks quite in the Japanese style, and other times quite European ... every day I come back from street study I always draw out all the figures I have seen during the day (from notebook or from memory) ... to make a finished picture I compose all those figures.

He often enjoyed the way snow affected the everyday landscape of the city: 'that house in front of my window is painted in black and yellow.