Kawase Hasui was born in Tokyo with the real given name of Bunjiro, and passed away there too. He studied Western-style art at the Hakuba-Western Art Research Institute under Okada Saburosuke. In 1910 he became a student of Kaburaki Kiyokata. Inspired by Eight Views of Omi by Ito Shinsui, who was working in the same studio, Hasui started new printing work from 1914. In the same year, he published Shiobara Okane Road and two other prints through the Watanabe printing firm. In 1920 he cemented his reputation as a print artist with the collection Souvenirs of Travels, First Series. He always worked on landscape printing, such as the 1919 series Tokyo Juni Dai (“Twelve Scenes of Tokyo”) and the 1926 series Nihon Fukei Senshu (“Selection of Scenes of Japan”), pioneering new frontiers with a rich sense of travel and lyricism. In 1953 the creative process of Zojoji no Yuki (”Snow at Zojoji Temple”) was documented by the Cultural Properties Protection Committee.