Tsuruta Gorô was born in Tokyô. He was active as an illustrator, as a woodblock artist and as a painter. Until 1920 he lived in Seoul, where he worked for a Korean newspaper. He returned to Japan, and exhibited with (a.o.) the Teiten and the Nitten. In the 1920 he designed woodblock prints for the publishing houses of Katô Junji and Sakai-Kawaguchi, mainly landscape prints and prints depicting beautiful women (bijin). He went to Europe in 1930, and during the war he served as an artist for the army. After the war he was one of the co-founders of the Nihon Sanrin Bijutsu Kyôkai - The Japanese Mountain Woods Art Society. He painted many views of national parks.
