Hishikawa Moronobu (; 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. Early life Born in Hoda at the distant end of Edo Bay, Moronobu was the son of a well-respected embroiderer of rich tapestries who produced it for the use of temples and wealthy patrons. After moving to Edo in the 1660s, Moronobu, who had likely learned skills from his father's craft, and studied both Tosa and Kanō-style painting. He thus had a solid grounding in both decorative crafts and academic painting, which served him well when he then turned to ukiyo-e, which he studied with his mentor, the Kanbun Master. Work The earliest known illustration of Moronobu that can be dated comes from his work titled One Hundred Warrior Poets from 1672, although earlier works are yet possible to surface. By the mid-1670s Moronobu had already become the most important ukiyo-e printmaker, a position he maintained until his death. He produced more than 100 sets of illustrations, perhaps as many as 150, with around 20 being of an erotic nature. Though it is difficult to attribute to him many unsigned examples (for example, the scholar Kiyoshi Shibui established, in 1926, a basis for crediting some of the designs previously given to Moronobu as the work of Sugumura Jihei). Very few of Moronobu's single-sheet prints have survived, and most, if not all, are unsigned. Moronobu was not the "founder" of ukiyo-e, as some early scholars surmised. Instead, he made an assimilation of inchoate ukiyo-e designs by previous artists, a consolidation of genre and early ukiyo-e painting and prints. It was Moronobu who created the first truly mature form of ukiyo-e, in a style of great strength and presence that would set the standards for generations of artists who followed. Moronobu's mastery of line has often been cited in assessments of his oeuvre, as well as the interactive arrangement of figures, which seem always to serve a dramatic function not usually seen in the work of his predecessors. Some of Moronobu's prints are found with hand coloring, but this specimen is a sumizuri-e (:ja:墨摺絵) (print with black pigment only) in its original, uncolored state. There is something almost elemental in Moronobu's line work and figure placements in black