, artist, also sometimes known as Yamamoto Tamenosuke, was born in Mino province

Mino Province

, one of the old provinces of Japan, encompassed part of modern-day Gifu Prefecture. It was sometimes called . Mino Province bordered Echizen, Hida, Ise, Mikawa, Ōmi, Owari, and Shinano Provinces....

, Japan. He first trained in the Nanga

Nanga (Japanese painting)

, also known as , was a school of Japanese painting which flourished in the late Edo period among artists who considered themselves literati, or intellectuals. While each of these artists was, almost by definition, unique and independent, they all shared an admiration for traditional Chinese culture...

 (Bunjinga) style before studying Western painting with Charles Wirgman

Charles Wirgman

Charles Wirgman was an English artist and cartoonist, the creator of the Japan Punch and illustrator in China and Meiji period Japan for the Illustrated London News....

 and Goseda Horyu (1827–92) and under Antonio Fontanesi. Yamamoto then went to Paris, where he remained for over ten years and studied at the school of Fine Arts as Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the Academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.-Life:Jean-Léon Gérôme was born...

’s student 1878-1887. While in Paris he mixed with the city's artists and intelligentsia, and he supplied work for the illustrated edition of Robert de Montesquiou

Robert de Montesquiou

Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac , was a French aesthete, Symbolist poet, art collector and dandy....

's Les chauves-souris.

Returning to Japan he opened a painting academy, the Seikokan, in Edo

Edo

, also romanized as Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of the Japanese capital Tokyo, and was the seat of power for the Tokugawa shogunate which ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868...

, teaching the French style of the Barbizon school

Barbizon school

The Barbizon school of painters were part of a movement towards realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870...

. This was later renamed the Tenshin Dojo after his friend and fellow-artist Kuroda Seiki

Kuroda Seiki

Viscount was the pseudonym of a Japanese painter and teacher, noted for bringing Western theories about art to a wide Japanese audience. He was among the leaders of the yōga movement in late 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese painting...

 returned to Japan and joined him in teaching there, introducing the techniques of plein-air painting.

Among his works are Junishi (1892), a cycle of twelve oil paintings in the Western style based on the theme of the signs of the Chinese zodiac

Chinese zodiac

The Shēngxiào , better known in English as the Chinese Zodiac, is a scheme that relates each year to an animal and its reputed attributes, according to a 12-year mathematical cycle...

(ten of which are extant).