Yozo Hamaguchi was born in the Japanese Prefecture of Wakayama in 1909 and left the family soy sauce business to study sculpture at the Tokyo University of Arts. Whilst living in Paris in the 1930s Hamaguchi studied oil painting, watercolours and copperplate engraving. Hamaguchi moved back to Tokyo on the brink of World War II but would return to Paris in 1953, and in 1955 turned his artistic attention to the technique of mezzotint. Hamaguchi is remembered as 'the most distinguished mid-20th century advocate' of the technique, not only because it was a very unusual medium for an artist of his generation, but because of his talent for producing delicate and tranquil imagery through rich, textual gradients of colour.