One of these days I should do an ‘unboxing’ video but I actually tend to unbox deliveries in a few stages because the process can…

Here’s another delivery from Japan but this time it only contained yakusha-e triptychs but some of them are really stunning!  I’ve featured the subject of…

There were a few deliveries in the first half of 2023 so this post is a bit of a big one! It mixes modern Sharaku…

Now just a few prints from the last half of 2023, starting with one of my favourite stories “Oshichi at the watchtower”: I’ve also been…

There’s a lot of buzz right now around the emerging field of “generative artificial intelligence” – online, publicly available machine learning models that can create…

Sometimes when I see a print in auction I am intrigued but something looks a bit wrong or I’m in 2 minds whether to bid.…

Here is a lovely little play programme (see all the pages below) that would have been bought by someone who went to see a kabuki…

This is actually 2 deliveries that arrived within a few weeks of each other. Most of these haven’t been identified yet so watch this apace!…

Banzuke are theatre programs distributed to audience members, showcasing information about upcoming performances and the actors who will be performing. Some were purely for advertisement…

This is a lovely and quite unusual series in that it is in the smaller chuban format, half the size of the usual oban.   Title:…

This is one of my favourite series – the production quality is very high, with lots of lovely bokashi and bold clashing colours with that…

This is another hugely under appreciated series by Kunichika working in collaboration with lesser known artists of the late Meiji era such as Kaoru Umemoto.…

Signature: 国周筆 Kunichika hitsu; Date: 1870-1871    明治04 (1871) / 06  Censor seal 未六改; Publisher: 万屋 孫兵衛  Yorozuya Magobē; Carver: 片田彫長 Katada Chojirō This fairly…

Toyohara Kunichika, 1883; “The Popularity of the Upstairs Dressing Room” (Gakuya no nikai kage no hyoban); Publisher: Takazawa Fusajiro; Size: Ôban 37.5 x 25 cms…

This is a batch of rather lovely prints that were being sold in Japan from a collection amassed over 45 years. The quality of the…

This batch arrived a little while ago but I’ve been busy and the house has been too messy to get them all photographed, until the…

Another marvellous delivery of Japanese prints hit my door mat a bit early this month, which allowed me to take the opportunity to photograph them…

After years of listening to the experts talk about using the “Kabuki Nenpyō” (歌舞伎年表, Kabuki Chronology) to research information in yakusha-e, I decided that it…

Nishiki-e: or “brocade pictures” is essentially the name given to all multicoloured woodblock prints Ukiyo-e: “floating world pictures” are pictures inspired by the Edo/Tokyo pleasure…

Nishiki-e (brocade printing) in theory is a simple technique – you “just” paint an image; a carver creates a block to print each of the…