A painter of the Edo period. He was born the son of Uesugi Hikoemon, a retainer of the Tanba Sasayama domain who later served the Yodo domain in Yamashiro, and afterwards succeeded to the Nagasawa house. His given name was Masakatsu, or Gyo, and his courtesy name Hyokei.

He entered the studio of Maruyama Okyo, then the central figure of Kyoto painting, and among his many fellow pupils stood out for a sharp, witty individuality quite unlike his teacher's gentle manner. From the winter of 1786 he carried out, in Okyo's stead, the sliding-door paintings for temples in the Nanki region of present-day Wakayama, among them Muryoji and Sodoji; their bold composition and unrestrained brushwork are especially remarkable. He went on to paint door panels for Saikoji in Shimane, Yakushiji in Nara, Shoshuji in Toyohashi and many others. The "fish" seal in the shape of an ice crystal, its upper right corner broken away after the fifth month of 1792, serves as a guide in dating his work; his signature also changed at about the same time from semi-cursive to cursive script. In the winter of 1794 he travelled down to Hiroshima, leaving the album Eight Views of Miyajima (private collection, Important Cultural Property), and the following year painted the door panels of Daijoji in Hyogo. He died away from home in Osaka at the age of forty-six. Late works such as the Rocky Coast screens (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the Red Cliff screens (private collection) show a free reading of his subjects and a range of formal experiment, expressing a vitality entirely his own. His standing as an individual artist has risen sharply in recent years.