Born to a Japanese aristocrat father and a Chinese-Peruvian mother in Lima, Peru in 1929, Tilsa Tsuchiya expressed artistic instincts from her earliest childhood. As a young woman Tsuchiya studied painting and printmaking at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lima, where she won first a place in the Peruvian delegation to the first Biennale de la Jeunesse in Paris, and later in 1960 a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne.

On this first voyage to Europe, Tsuchiya passed through Rome and Florence on her way to Paris, where she encountered masterworks by Botticelli, Fra Angelico and della Francesca. The bright, ethereal palettes and weighty bodies draped in rich, tactile fabrics were unlike anything the young painter had ever encou...