Yasushi Tanaka was a Japanese painter known for his portraits of women. Born May 13, 1886 in Saitama Prefecture, Tanaka left his home in Japan just after grade school to escape poverty. He relocated to Seattle where he learned English and finished his education at Broadway High School. He became an apprentice to Fokko Tadama, a well-known Dutch painter who taught several Japanese immigrants, and studied art history using the books at the Seattle Public Library. While his exhibition history is unclear, his work was shown in a number of Seattle galleries. He also began teaching en plein air painting.

His modernist style was still fairly uncommon in Seattle and when he began painting nudes around 1916, they were ill-received by the American audience. He married the art writer Louise Gebhardin 1917 and emigrated once again to Paris in 1920 in the hopes to better align with the artistic sensibilities in Europe. He found success in France where he had multiple shows at annual exhibitions and made sales to both the French government and Japanese royalty. Likely influenced by Renoir, his style became more refined with more realistic rendering. Yasushi Tanaka died during the German Occupation on April 24, 1942 at only 54 years old. He received a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Japan in 1997 and his work is in the collection of the Museum of History & Industry in Seattle.