Yashima gakutei biography sample

Yashima Gakutei, “Carp Ascending a Waterfall”,1892 (Edo Period), Surimono, Woodblock Print with ink and Color on Paper, 18.8 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Born in the Honshu city of Osaka circa 1786, Yashima Gakutei (八島岳亭) was a Japanese poet and artist known for the quality of his woodblock prints and his artistic contribution to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵) a traditional poetic art form that flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth-century.

Among the images depicted in ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings were landscapes, wrestlers and kabuki actors, dancers and courtesans, folk tales and historic scenes, and images of an erotic nature.

Gakutei was the illegitimate son of the samurai Hirata under the Tokugawa shogunate established by Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川 家康), one of the three Great Unifiers of Japan during the Edo period.

Gakutei’s mother later married into the Yashima clan, thus granting him the name of Yashima Gakutei. He received his a