Koitsu | Five-storied Pagoda at Nikko

Tsuchiya Koitsu (1870–1949)

For Tsuchiya Koitsu, in a sense, life began at 60. That’s when he met Shozaburo Watanabe and started publishing designs with him. Decades earlier, he’d been a student of the legendary Ukiyoe master Kobayashi Kiyochika for 19 years — even living in his house — and was known for his dramatic triptyches portraying the Sino-Japanese War of the 1890s. In the end it was his work with Watanabe that gained him fame, and his particularly modern appreciation of water reflections and light effects.