Born in Edo in 1686, Masanobu Okumura was a painter, writer, illustrator, and proprietor of the Okumura-ya publishing company. Mostly self-taught, Masanobu studied the early works of Torii Kiyonobu before becoming a self-made publisher circa 1724. Early on, Masanobu integrated Western perspectives into his illustrations, producing large-scale prints with shortened perspectives. This particular genre was later known as uki-e, or "looming pictures." 

A truly innovative and prolific artist, Masanobu is also credited with pioneering the benizuri, ishizuri, and urushi-e styles, as well as hanshira-e print formatting. Most notably, he championed coloring printing techniques utilizing multiple woodblock prints. With the advent of multi-woodblock printing introduced in Japan circa 1740, Masanobu was the first among his contemporaries to transition from hand coloring to print coloring utilizing the new technology. His efforts in color printing advanced a new aesthetic in which the quality of the print depended on both line and color. 

Commercially successful and widely recognized throughout the capital of Edo, Masanobu Okumura passed away in 1764 at the age of seventy-eight. In terms of subject matter, his bijin-ga, Kabuki actors, kacho-e (birds and flowers), and musha-e (warrior prints) are recurrent in a wide variety of mediums and are exceedingly rare. Utamaro excelled not only at portraying eroticism in the context of everyday life but also nuances of the feminine psyche. Born in the capital of Edo in 1754, he studied with artist Toriyama Seiken until 1788. Throughout his professional career, Utamaro produced, painted, and illustrated nearly two thousand works, including picture books, Kabuki libretti, shunga, and one hundred and twenty bijin-ga print series. He also pioneered okubi-e portraiture, rather than standardized, full-length designs which were more commonplace at the time. Unsurprisingly, Utamaro maintained a dominant presence in ukiyo-e production throughout the last decade of the eighteenth century. 

But his luck was soon to change. In 1804, Utamaro produced a three-panel print depicting the Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his concubines, a violation which earned him three days in jail and fifty days under house arrest. Such draconian punishment is believed to be the cause of his death two years later, in 1806. 

Though his death was premature, Kitagawa Utamaro continued to exert varying degrees of influence. Shin hanga artists such as Hashiguchi Goyo and Ito Shinsui, reassessing conventional methods of ukiyo-e, turned to the works of Utamaro to achieve the same quality in their prints. Conversely, Western collectors and connoisseurs of Utamaro, such as van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, transformed European painting as a direct result of their interaction with such prints. No matter the influence, it is clear based on professional achievement and legacy that Kitagawa Utamaro is truly an exceptional artist within the genre of ukiyo-e.