東山魁夷

Kaii Higashiyama was the defining landscape painter of post-war Japan. Born in Yokohama in 1908, he trained in nihonga at Tokyo School of Fine Arts under Somei Yuki, then studied art history in Berlin in the early 1930s. His breakthrough came in 1947 with "Afterglow," a view from Katsuroyama that established his reputation for spare, meditative compositions—epitomized by his 1950 masterpiece "The Way," which reduced landscape to its essence.