About the artist
Koichi Okumura was a 20th century landscape painter and print designer best known for his views of Kyoto. Born in Kyoto, Okumura studied Japanese-style painting with Goun Nishimura and graduated from Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting. He built his reputation as a landscape painter and actively exhibited his paintings in state-sponsored exhibitions in the years before WWII. Following the end of the war, American soldiers provided a newfound audience for woodblock prints. Beginning in 1948, Okumura worked with the publisher Unsodo and designed several print series, such as Twelve Views of Kyoto (1948). Okumura taught at Saga Fine Arts Junior College and became a professor at Kyoto City University of the Arts.