Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Kuniyoshi was admitted to the Utagawa school as a teenager and then spent more than a decade going nowhere. He sold tatami mats to stay afloat. The breakthrough came around 1827 with a series of warrior prints illustrating the Chinese novel Suikoden, tattooed heroes mid-fight, and it made him famous almost immediately.

Violence suited him. He is the woodblock artist for skeletons, sea battles, giant whales and monsters, and he handled crowded action better than almost anyone working in the medium.

The Tenpō reforms of the 1840s banned prints of actors and courtesans, so he drew cats instead, and fish, and caricatures where the cats are clearly standing in for the people he was not allowed to depict. Censors understood what he was doing and could do very little about it.

He taught a generation of students, several of whom carried ukiyo-e into the Meiji period after his death in 1861.