Okumura masanobu biography of george

Japanese painter

In this Japanese name, the surname is Okumura.

Okumura Masanobu (Japanese: 奥村 政信; 1686 – 13 March 1764) was a Japanese print designer, book publisher, and painter.

He also illustrated novelettes and in his early years wrote some fiction. At first his work adhered to the Torii school, but later drifted beyond that. He is a figure in the formative era of ukiyo-e doing early works on actors and bijin-ga ("pictures of beautiful women").

Life and career

While Masanobu's early life is largely undocumented, he is believed to have been born about 1686, possibly in Edo (modern Tokyo). Edo was a small fishing village when Tokugawa Ieyasu chose it as his administrative capital of the Tokugawa shogunate, and by the early 17th century the city had prospered and its population had grown to half a million.

Masanobu appears to have been self-taught painter (though he did study poetry under Tachiba Fukaku); he is not known to have belonged to any a