1618 (or 1625)-! 694. The son of a dyer and embroiderer, he was born in Hoda in the province ofAwa on Edo Bay. Even while still quite young, he probably designed costly garments on behalf of his father, which might well explain his predilection for details and decorative patterns. He was probably trained first by some unknown master in the art of the Kano and Tosa schools. On his arrival in Edo in the i66os, he soon concentrated exclusively on ukiyo-e. At this time, the woodblock print was still in its infancy. His first book illustrations appeared in 1672. His erotic illustrations with their scenes of courtesans and brothels were presumably based on anonymous erotic prints from Kyoto, to which, however, they were greatly superior, so that he can truly be called the father of the woodblock print as an independent genre, and its first great master. The delicate lines of his figures became the ukiyo-e ideal, and the stormy vigour of his compositions, while imitated by many, was only emulated by a very few later masters. He 1st also the first artist of the genre about whose life anything is known, and was the founder of the Hishikawa or Edo school, whose influence was still strong in the 19th century, and which set itself the task of portraying contemporary life. Some 150 woodblock albums survive from Moronobus hand, employing the traditional monochrome technique; their motifs are chiefly historical and literary, but they also include kimono pattern books, ukiyo-e albums and collections of erotica. By contrast, there are very few individual sheets, most of them from dismantled albums, but they include some very beautiful female portraits. The print reproduced here was printed in black ink and then coloured by hand.
From Hillier J., Japanese Colour Prints, Phaidon, 3rd edn,1993