Born at Innai in Chofu (now Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture), the son of a painter in the service of the Chofu domain. At nineteen he studied in the school of Shokawa-in Masanobu Kano at Kobikicho in Edo; a fellow pupil was Gaho Hashimoto, who became his friend for life. In the disorder at the end of the shogunate he put down his brush and busied himself with the affairs of the nation. He lost his regular position with the fall of the shogunate and the Meiji Restoration, and for a time made preparatory drawings for a trading firm; but “Spirited Horse Beneath Cherry Blossom” and “Snowy Mountains at Dusk”, shown at the second joint painting exhibition, were highly praised by Fenollosa of the Imperial University and by Tenshin Okakura, who saw in them both the true inheritance of Japanese painting and the possibility of its emergence as a modern art. From then on Hogai gave himself to the creation of a new Japanese painting, bringing the realism and spatial expression of Western painting into the Japanese tradition. At the same time he worked for the founding of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts). He died in 1888, without seeing the school open the following year.