Tsuchiya Reiichi was born in Gifu Prefecture. His father was a nihonga painter and, beginning in grade school until he was 14 when his father died, Tsuchiya painted one picture each day. In 1967 he graduated from the Musashino Art School in Tokyo and the same year won an award at the 10th Shin-nitten. The recipient of several Nitten prizes, he received acclaim as an up-and-coming artist in the 1970's. In 1979 the Toyama Prefecture Modern Museum bought one of his paintings and in 1988 he became the first Nitten judge to have been born after the war. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Ginza Shiseido Gallery, the Gifu Takashimaya department store, and the Toyo Art Gallery

Tsuchiya is best known for his dramatic landscapes of mountains and roads, sea and sky. The painting of Mt. Fuji offered here is an excellent example of Tsuchiya's finest work, as he uses the play of dark, swirling clouds around the brilliant peak to gain the fullest compositional contrast.