View of Ushijima from the Mouth of the Sanya Canal and the Asakusa River in the Eastern Capital, from an untitled series of Western-style Views of Edo

Kuniyoshi was an ukiyo-e painter and printmaker who worked in Edo. When a youth, he was accepted as a pupil by Utagawa Toyokuni. He studied Tosa, Kano, and Maruyama painting, and then founded his own style, which was so popular that it is said that the young men of his time often asked him to tattoo his designs on their bodies. Kuniyoshi was famous for his prints of actors and animals. He also specialized, with invention and gusto, in illustrations of heroic episodes in Japanese history; the best of his landscapes equal those of Hiroshige. His early style was comparatively simple, with landscape backgrounds in the manner of Hiroshige. Later his work became increasingly complex, with a taste for the bizarre, the fantastic, and the ghoulish.