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Emperor enjoying piece with family — 共楽泰平貴顕図 by Inoue Yasuji — Japanese woodblock print

Emperor enjoying piece with family — 共楽泰平貴顕図

by Inoue Yasuji

Source:
ukiyo-e.org

Description

Emperor Enjoying Peace with Family is a courtly genre print by Inoue Yasuji that shows the Meiji emperor in an informal domestic setting alongside members of his household. As Meiji prints of imperial subjects developed in the 1880s, artists were asked to balance the grandeur of state ritual with newly emphasized images of the imperial family as a model nuclear unit, embodying the virtues the regime hoped to propagate. Inoue Yasuji handles this tension by adopting a measured triptych composition in which Western-style furniture, hybrid court dress, and traditional sliding screens coexist within a single interior. His kosen-ga training under Kobayashi Kiyochika shows in the way he models faces and fabric with controlled bokashi gradations rather than flat blocks, and in the disciplined recession of the architecture. Although the print does not belong to his Tokyo Famous Places series, it shares that project's documentary register: the room itself reads as a kind of meisho, a public exemplar of how the modernizing throne might present itself in private. Within Inoue Yasuji's output, ceremonial sheets like this complement his landscape work by showing that he could apply the same technical discipline to genre figure compositions. The ukiyo-e.org archive preserves this impression, where it remains a reference point for studies of Meiji imperial iconography and of Inoue Yasuji's contribution to it.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Emperor enjoying piece with family — 共楽泰平貴顕図 was created by Inoue Yasuji (井上安治).