Shigeru Aoki
was a Japanese painter, noted for his work in combining Japanese legends and religious subjects with the yōga (Western-style) art movement in late 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese painting. Biography Aoki was born to an ex-samurai class household in Kurume, in northern Kyūshū, Japan, where his father had been a retainer of the Arima clan daimyō of Kurume Domain. Although his family strongly disapproved of his interest in art, he left home in 1899 to pursue his studies in Tokyo, first with Koyama Shōtarō, a pupil of the Italian foreign advisor Antonio Fontanesi, who had been hired by the Meiji government in the late 1870s to introduce western oil painting to Japan. From 1900 he became a pupil of Kuroda Seiki, then an instructor at the Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō (present-day Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). In the autumn of 1902, he travelled to Mount Myōgi in Gunma Prefecture and to Nagano Prefecture on a sketching excursion. After his return, he displayed some of his completed works at Kuroda's 8th Hakuba-kai Exhibition, where his use of the techniques of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood combined with themes from the Kojiki resulted in great critical acclaim. Aoki finished his studies in