PAINTERS from Japan

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Japanese Painters of all time. This list of famous Japanese Painters is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Japanese Painters.

1. Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929)

With an HPI of 69.90, Yayoi Kusama is the most famous Japanese Painter.  Her biography has been translated into 42 different languages on wikipedia.

Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生, Kusama Yayoi, born 22 March 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts for a year in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. She was inspired by American Abstract impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly coloured polka dots. She experienced a period in the 70s during which her work was largely forgotten, but a revival of interest in the 1980s brought her art back into public view. Kusama has continued to create art in various museums around the world, from the 1950s through the 2020s. Kusama has been open about her mental health and has resided since the 1970s in a mental health facility which she leaves daily to walk to her nearby studio to work. She says that art has become her way to express her mental problems. "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art," she told an interviewer in 2012. "I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live."

2. Utamaro (1753 - 1806)

With an HPI of 66.29, Utamaro is the 2nd most famous Japanese Painter.  His biography has been translated into 48 different languages.

Kitagawa Utamaro (Japanese: 喜多川 歌麿; c. 1753 – 31 October 1806) was a Japanese artist. He is one of the most highly regarded designers of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings, and is best known for his bijin ōkubi-e "large-headed pictures of beautiful women" of the 1790s. He also produced nature studies, particularly illustrated books of insects. Little is known of Utamaro's life. His work began to appear in the 1770s, and he rose to prominence in the early 1790s with his portraits of beauties with exaggerated, elongated features. He produced over 2000 known prints and was one of the few ukiyo-e artists to achieve fame throughout Japan in his lifetime. In 1804 he was arrested and manacled for fifty days for making illegal prints depicting the 16th-century military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and died two years later. Utamaro's work reached Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was very popular, enjoying particular acclaim in France. He influenced the European Impressionists, particularly with his use of partial views and his emphasis on light and shade, which they imitated. The reference to the "Japanese influence" among these artists often refers to the work of Utamaro.

3. Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797 - 1861)

With an HPI of 63.39, Utagawa Kuniyoshi is the 3rd most famous Japanese Painter.  His biography has been translated into 34 different languages.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (Japanese: 歌川 国芳, [ɯtaɡawa kɯɲiꜜjoɕi]; 1 January 1798 – 14 April 1861) was one of the last great masters of the Japanese ukiyo-e style of woodblock prints and painting. He was a member of the Utagawa school. The range of Kuniyoshi's subjects included many genres: landscapes, women, Kabuki actors, cats, and mythical animals. He is known for depictions of the battles of legendary samurai heroes. His artwork incorporated aspects of Western representation in landscape painting and caricature.

4. Suzuki Harunobu (1725 - 1770)

With an HPI of 60.51, Suzuki Harunobu is the 4th most famous Japanese Painter.  His biography has been translated into 31 different languages.

Suzuki Harunobu (Japanese: 鈴木 春信; c. 1725 – 8 July 1770) was a Japanese designer of woodblock print art in the ukiyo-e style. He was an innovator, the first to produce full-color prints (nishiki-e) in 1765, rendering obsolete the former modes of two- and three-color prints. Harunobu used many special techniques, and depicted a wide variety of subjects, from classical poems to contemporary beauties. Like many artists of his day, Harunobu also produced a number of shunga, or erotic images. During his lifetime and shortly afterwards, many artists imitated his style. A few, such as Harushige, even boasted of their ability to forge the work of the great master. Much about Harunobu's life is unknown.

5. Tsuguharu Foujita (1886 - 1968)

With an HPI of 59.67, Tsuguharu Foujita is the 5th most famous Japanese Painter.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (藤田 嗣治, Fujita Tsuguharu, November 27, 1886 – January 29, 1968) was a Japanese–French painter. After having studied Western-style painting in Japan, Foujita traveled to Paris, where he encountered the international modern art scene of the Montparnasse neighborhood and developed an eclectic style that borrowed from both Japanese and European artistic traditions. With his unusual fashion and distinctive figurative style, Foujita reached the height of his fame in 1920s Paris. His watercolor and oil works of nudes, still lifes, and self-portraits were a commercial success and he became a notable figure in the Parisian art scene. Foujita spent three years voyaging through South and North America before returning to Japan in 1933, documenting his observations in sketches and paintings. Upon his return home, Foujita became an official war artist during World War II, illustrating battle scenes to raise the morale of the Japanese troops and citizens. His oil paintings won him acclaim during the war, but the public's view of him turned negative in the wake of the Japanese defeat. Without significant prospects in the post-WWII Japanese art scene, Foujita returned to France in 1950, where he would spend the rest of his life. He received French nationality in 1955 and converted to Catholicism in 1959. His latter years were spent working on the frescoes for a small, Romanesque chapel in Reims that he had constructed. He died in 1968, not long after the chapel officially opened. Foujita is a celebrated figure in France, but public opinion of him in Japan remains mixed due to his monumental depictions of the war. Recent retrospective exhibitions organized since 2006 in Japan have sought to establish Foujita's place in Japanese twentieth-century art history.

6. Sesshū Tōyō (1420 - 1506)

With an HPI of 59.53, Sesshū Tōyō is the 6th most famous Japanese Painter.  His biography has been translated into 40 different languages.

Sesshū Tōyō (雪舟 等楊, c. 1420 – August 26, 1506), also known simply as Sesshū (雪舟), was a Japanese Zen monk and painter who is considered a great master of Japanese ink painting. Initially inspired by Chinese landscapes, Sesshū's work holds a distinctively Japanese style that reflects Zen Buddhist aesthetics. His prominent work captured images of landscapes, portraits, and birds and flowers paintings, infused with Zen Buddhist beliefs, flattened perspective, and emphatic lines. Sesshū was born into the samurai Oda family (小田家) and trained at Shōkoku-ji temple in Kyoto, Japan, as a Zen monk. From his early childhood, Sesshū showed a talent for painting and eventually became widely revered throughout Japan as a wise, reputable Zen scholar, and the greatest painter priest of Zen-Shu. Sesshū worked in a painting atelier whilst training under Tenshō Shūbun (c. 1418–1463). But upon visiting China, his work took on a distinctive Chinese influence, merging Japanese and Chinese styles to develop his individualistic style of Zen paintings. Sesshū's influence on painting was so wide that many schools of art appointed him their founder. Sesshū's most acclaimed works are Winter Landscape (c. 1470s), Birds and Flowers (1420–1506) and Four Landscape Scrolls of the Seasons (1420–1506).

7. Hishikawa Moronobu (1618 - 1694)

With an HPI of 59.13, Hishikawa Moronobu is the 7th most famous Japanese Painter.  His biography has been translated into 25 different languages.

Hishikawa Moronobu (Japanese: 菱川 師宣; 1618 – 25 July 1694) was a Japanese artist known for popularizing the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock prints and paintings in the late 17th century. He consolidated the works of scattered Japanese art styles and forged the early development of ukiyo-e.

8. Yoshitoshi (1839 - 1892)

With an HPI of 58.95, Yoshitoshi is the 8th most famous Japanese Painter.  His biography has been translated into 25 different languages.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (Japanese: 月岡 芳年; also named Taiso Yoshitoshi 大蘇 芳年; 30 April 1839 – 9 June 1892) was a Japanese printmaker. Yoshitoshi has widely been recognized as the last great master of the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock printing and painting. He is also regarded as one of the form's greatest innovators. His career spanned two eras – the last years of Edo period Japan, and the first years of modern Japan following the Meiji Restoration. Like many Japanese, Yoshitoshi was interested in new things from the rest of the world, but over time he became increasingly concerned with the loss of many aspects of traditional Japanese culture, among them traditional woodblock printing. By the end of his career, Yoshitoshi was in an almost single-handed struggle against time and technology. As he worked on in the old manner, Japan was adopting Western mass reproduction methods like photography and lithography. Nonetheless, in a Japan that was turning away from its own past, he almost singlehandedly managed to push the traditional Japanese woodblock print to a new level, before it effectively died with him. His life was summed up by John Stevenson: Yoshitoshi's courage, vision and force of character gave ukiyo-e another generation of life, and illuminated it with one last burst of glory. His reputation has only continued to grow, both in the West, and among younger Japanese, and he is now almost universally recognized as the greatest Japanese artist of his era.

9. Kunisada (1786 - 1865)

With an HPI of 58.55, Kunisada is the 9th most famous Japanese Painter.  His biography has been translated into 23 different languages.

Utagawa Kunisada (Japanese: 歌川 国貞; 1786 – 12 January 1865), also known as Utagawa Toyokuni III (三代 歌川 豊国, Sandai Utagawa Toyokuni), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist. He is considered the most popular, prolific and commercially successful designer of ukiyo-e woodblock prints in 19th-century Japan. In his own time, his reputation far exceeded that of his contemporaries, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi.

10. Masaaki Hatsumi (b. 1931)

With an HPI of 56.63, Masaaki Hatsumi is the 10th most famous Japanese Painter.  His biography has been translated into 20 different languages.

Masaaki Hatsumi (初見 良昭, Hatsumi Masaaki, born December 2, 1931), formerly Yoshiaki Hatsumi, is the founder of the Bujinkan Organization and is the former Togakure-ryū soke (grandmaster). He no longer teaches, but currently resides in Noda, Chiba, Japan.