Dainagon Yukinari

Dainagon Yukinari is a portrait print by Inoue Yasuji, signed Tankei Inoue, from the educational series An Educational Account of Self-Made Men (Kyoiku Risshiki). Fujiwara no Yukinari, known by his court title Dainagon Yukinari, was a Heian-period courtier celebrated above all as one of the Sanseki, the three great calligraphers of his age. By including him in a Meiji series on exemplary self-made figures, the publisher framed mastery of brushwork as a model of personal cultivation suited to the modern citizen. Inoue Yasuji shows Yukinari at his writing desk in court robes, brush in hand, the implements of calligraphy arrayed before him; the figure is rendered with the volumetric clarity and disciplined contours that Inoue Yasuji had learned from his teacher Kobayashi Kiyochika and brought to his other figure work. While the print is far from his celebrated kosen-ga cityscapes and his Tokyo Famous Places landscapes, it shares those works' attention to controlled [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) tonality and to legibility at small scale. Such didactic sheets formed a significant portion of Meiji prints, supplementing classroom instruction and helping to popularize a reformed canon of moral exemplars. The [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org archive preserves this impression, allowing study of how Inoue Yasuji applied his landscape-trained graphic discipline to historical portraiture and contributed to the educational visual culture of his decade.