Print

This 1867 Metropolitan Museum of Art [triptych](/glossary/triptych) of woodblock prints by Hasegawa Sadanobu I dates to the last year of the Tokugawa shogunate (Meiji 1 in the Western calendar shift) and represents Sadanobu in his late period, when both Osaka kabuki print culture and the Tokugawa political order were on the verge of dramatic transformation. The triptych format — three coordinated [oban](/glossary/oban) sheets forming a single horizontal composition — was the more ambitious Edo-school scale, and its use here signals Sadanobu's full mastery of the various Japanese print formats beyond his core Osaka [chuban](/glossary/chuban) work. Accessioned as JP3345 with overall dimensions of 14 3/4 by 29 3/4 inches, the print preserves Sadanobu's contribution to the visual record of late-Tokugawa theatrical and urban culture at the moment of its disappearance, on the eve of the Meiji Restoration that would reshape every aspect of Japanese commercial print production within a single decade.