We like mysteries, don’t we? Today we go for this fabulous Hokusai self-portrait as a drawing at the end of a letter to ... some unidentified publisher. It is signed Hachiemon 八右衛門 with the seal Manji 卍, adding his age as 83 years old 八十三歳, so we know this must date from 1842. Even when…
As the advert for the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji appeared in the 1st Month of 1831 in Part 12 of Ryūtei Tanehiko’s 柳亭種彦 (1783-1842) Shōhon jitate『正本製』, it was indicated that what we now usually read as Fugaku 富嶽 should be read as ‘Fuji.’ It is now difficult to know whether this was meant to…
Nobody will ever forget these lines once you have read them. That artist who was confident that he would ‘at ninety have got even closer to the essence of art, and at the age of one hundred I will reach a magnificent level, and at a hundred and ten, each dot and each line will…
Just forgetting about the printing revolution enabling full-colour printing for those who could benefit from this development, and just focusing on the now well-established benizurie prints, it is obvious that Torii Kiyomitsu, the number two in the 1750s, climbs to the first position in the 1760s. The number two is his pupil, the new talent…
Summarizing: 1730s Prints: 1) Nishimura Shigenobu [25]; 2) Torii Kiyomasu II [21]; 3) Okumura Masanobu [20]. ((66)) 1730s Picture books: 1) Nishikawa Sukenobu [14/4]; 2) Takagi Sadatake [4/0/1]; 3) Okumura Masanobu [1/2]. ((26)) 1740s Prints: 1) Okumura Masanobu [41]; 2) Torii Kiyomasu II / Torii Kiyonobu II [36]; 3) Ishikawa Toyonobu [30]. ((107)) 1740s Picture…
A closer look at single prints in the 1730s through the 1750s – Perspective prints As for ukie, these seem to be an innovation that we owe to the visionary Okumura Masanobu, generally believed to date from 1739 onwards.[6] This date is based on a design after a theatrical performance in III/1739 of the play…
A closer look at single prints in the 1730s through the 1750s – Pillar prints We already saw three new developments in the format of single prints: the first examples of printing just two colours, the benizurie, from 1744, and pillar prints, or hashirae, as an experiment with a quite demanding surface to work with,…
Picture books in the years from the 1730s through the 1750s - General For much of this period, Nishikawa Sukenobu and Okumura Masanobu play a major role, Sukenobu ranking first with eighteen titles in the 1730s, and Okumura Masanobu ranking third, with only three titles. In the 1740s, Sukenobu is still holding the first position,…
Prints in the years from the 1730s through the 1750s - General By the 1730s, hand-coloured tane prints, actually last seen in 1723, definitely belong to the past. By then, until the early 1750s, or more precisely until 1752, as far as we know, equally hand-coloured lacquer prints, urushie, are the standard. But we are…
Going back to single print production in the early eighteenth century, it is quite helpful to have a more realistic idea of production figures for the novel phenomenon of single prints, but it may even be more important to apply the 3.5 multiplication factor to the genre of prints of actors in role. The figure…