Hokuju's Picture Album (Hokuju gafu)

This nineteenth-century woodblock-printed book held by the Victoria and Albert Museum is Hokuju's Picture Album (Hokuju gafu), a collection of the artist's designs presented in album format. Gafu (picture albums) were a distinctive genre of Edo period publishing in which a single artist's work was anthologized in book form, sometimes as a portfolio of finished compositions, sometimes as a model book for students, and sometimes as a showcase intended to demonstrate the range and skill of a working designer. The Hokuju gafu allowed the artist to gather his characteristic subjects, including landscapes, figures, and occasional studies of birds, flowers, and seasonal motifs, into a single bound object. Picture albums circulated widely among collectors and amateur painters, who used them both as objects of aesthetic appreciation and as practical references for their own brushwork. The survival of the Hokuju gafu in the V&A collection provides modern viewers with an integrated view of the artist's compositional repertoire, supplementing the single-sheet prints by which he is more commonly known and showing how he positioned his practice within the broader visual culture of late Edo Japan.