Kanō Tomonobu

Kanō Tomonobu studied at Kaiseijo. Training under Kanō Shōsen'in, Kawakami Tōgai and Charles Wirgman is recorded. Seigai Ōmura, Helen Hyde and Lilian May Miller are recorded as having studied under Kanō Tomonobu. The recorded working language is Japanese. Places of work recorded in the authority are Japan. Employment is recorded with Tokugawa shogunate, Ministry of Popular Affairs and Ministry of the Treasury. Positions recorded include goyō eshi.

Tomonobu apprenticed under the official painter for the shōgun (the oku-eshi) in 1859, at age 16. On the suggestion of his brother-in-law Kawada Hiromu, the governor of Sagami Province, who had travelled to France as part of a shogunal delegation, Tomonobu studied Western painting at the Foreign Studies Centre for two years beginning in 1863. He then spent three years beginning in 1865 at the school of Kawakami Tōgai, and while there studied with the English artist Charles Wirgman for two years. He helped the American art historian Ernest Fenollosa in his studies of Japanese art and introduced Fenollosa to the painter Kanō Hōgai. Tomonobu worked at the Ministry of Popular Affairs in 1870. He taught at the University of Tokyo in 1877, the Tokyo University Preparatory School in 1880, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1889.