Artist – KOTOZUKA Eiichi 琴塚 英一 (1906-1979)  was born in Osaka in 1906. Woodblock print artist, most prints for marketing reasons were "shin hanga", but his personal interes were "sosaku-hanga".He graduated from the Kyoto Kaiga Semmon Gakko (Technical School of Painting) in 1930. From 1932, he exhibited prints with Shun Yokai (Spring Principle Association), an artist’s organization that exhibited Western-style art. He also exhibited with the government sponsored Teiten.  He was a member of Nihon Hanga Kyokai (Japan Print Association) from 1938.  In addition to print making, Kotozuka exhibited Japanese-style paintings with the artists' organization Seiryusha, which he helped to found in 1929.  He was also a co-founder of Koryokusha in 1948 with fellow artists Tokuriki Tomikichiro (1902-2000), Kamei Tōbei  (1901-1977) and Tasaburo Takahashi (1904-1977) which they set up to publish their creative prints or "sosaku hanga" (self-made, self-cut, self-printed).

After WWII he created a number of designs for the publisher Uchida Publishing, including his most famous series Eight Snow Scenes of Kyoto. Other series created by the artist include Scenes from Four Historical Cities; Scenes from Shiga, Nara and Kyoto; and Four Scenes from Kyoto. He also participated in the design of the series Fifty Kinds of Flowers (Hana Goju Dai no Uchi) with Tobei Kamei and Tomikichiro Tokuriki and Twenty-Four Views In and Out of Kyoto with Tobei Komei. Kotozuka illustrated at least one children’s book after WWII titled Kaguyahime.

Personal life - There is only sparse information on KOTOZUKA Eiich's personal life. He was born in 1906 in the last years of the Meiji era (1868 - 1912). He died on March 11th 1979 in Kyoto. 


Aliases - Most of the artist's seals are read as "koto" ("琴") on both his sosaku hanga work and his shin-hanga work.


Disciples - no known disciples