from the series One Hundred Pictures by Kyôsai (Kyôsai hyakuzu)

This sheet from Kawanabe Kyosai's Kyôsai hyakuzu series represents the artist's facility with subjects drawn from Japanese mythology and legend. The series as a whole encompasses figures from Nô and Kabuki theater, Chinese literary and philosophical sources, Buddhist cosmology, and indigenous Japanese folk narrative. In this polychrome woodblock print—likely printed in ôban format on absorbent hôsho or torinoko washi—Kyosai's characteristic line work, transposed from brush to carved keyblock, retains the spontaneous quality of his ink painting practice. Color areas are printed with careful registration, and the palette, while constrained relative to Kyosai's full-color painted work, effectively differentiates figure from ground and foreground from background. The Hyakuzu series was conceived and executed during a period of cultural upheaval in early Meiji Japan, when traditional subject matter was simultaneously being questioned and reasserted; Kyosai's commitment to the full range of Japanese pictorial tradition gave the series its particular cultural resonance.