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…

Just enjoyed the excitement of opening another box of prints from Japan – it’s always fun to see if the auction photos were anything like…

Sharaku Toshusai was one of Edo’s most enigmatic artists as very little is known about him except that he was commissioned between 1794 and 1795…

I always use an agent in Japan to buy for me because most sellers on Japanese auction sites don’t do international shipping and it’s very…

Since Easter I have had 3 deliveries from Japan but didn’t have the time or space to unpack them and photograph them all. So this…

Sam Leiter gave me a copy of a summary of the plot in Japanese (below) which I had summarised by u/Extension_Pipe4293 on Reddit:  A playboy…

This is just a quick analysis of my own Kunichika collection – listing all collaborations between publisher & carver, where they have both been mentioned…

Ukiyo-e artists were famous for having many different styles of signature throughout their careers and often these can help you pin-point a rough date range…

Fukuda Kumajirō [福田熊次郎] and latterly his son Fukuda Hatsujirō [福田初次郎] (1894-1939) were a huge force in Meiji yakusha-e publishing. Their double-fish logo giving their name…

The Meiji period brought in a lot of relaxations in censorship and this brought about a boom in the number of newspapers all vying to…

Umbrellas don’t sound very thrilling but I’m always looking out for elements of ukiyo-e that illustrate aspects of the Meiji period – the preoccupations of…

In the early days of ukiyo-e artists, experimented with different types of background to give their characters better prominence and increate their visual impact. One…