Kobayashi Eitaku

Kobayashi Eitaku was a fishmonger's son from Nihonbashi, the market quarter of Edo, who was adopted into a family of the Kanō school, the painters who had served the shoguns for generations. Apprenticed in his early teens to the Kanō master Eitoku Tatsunobu, he was soon taken on as official painter to Ii Naosuke, lord of Hikone and the shogun's chief minister, and the post brought him samurai rank. In 1860 Ii was assassinated outside a gate of Edo Castle, and the young painter lost his patron.

Eitaku spent the following years travelling, then settled back in Nihonbashi and remade himself for a changing country. He studied Chinese Ming painting and Western techniques, learned ukiyo-e from the print designer Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, and from around 1870 produced colourful woodblock prints of Meiji Japan's new buildings and fashions. He also drew for newspapers and illustrated books.

His most widely travelled work was made for Hasegawa Takejirō, a Tokyo publisher who from 1885 issued Japanese fairy tales in English and other languages for foreign readers, many of them printed on soft, crinkled crepe paper. Eitaku illustrated 14 of the first 16 titles, from Momotarō, the boy born from a peach, to the old myth of the eight-headed serpent. He died in 1890, and much of his work ended up in Western collections, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston among them.