Brief Biography-Kitagawa Utamaro was an ukiyo-e painter in the Edo period. He was renowned for his Ōkubi-e pictures, the heads or upper parts of beautiful women. A contemporary of his was Katsushika Hokusai, the foremost ukiyo-e master of his era. Utamaro became highly successful with his Ōkubi-e images. However, the shogunate had him arrested and chained for fifty days for his caricature of the great warrior and warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, viewing cherry blossoms. Although his work influenced French impressionists, Vincent van Gogh being one, he used the ukiyo-e style in some backgrounds. Many well-known impressionists collected Japanese art for a period in the late nineteenth century known as Japonisme.