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

One print among the hundred designs comprising the Kyosai hyakuzu, this sheet continues the series' encyclopedic ambition. Kyosai organized his visual world through a sustained dialogue between the sacred and the comic, the precise and the grotesque, and the hyakuzu gives each of these registers its own space. This print may take up a genre subject — an artisan at work, a scene of street life, or a domestic interior — rendered in Kyosai's fluid, observational line. His genre scenes share with his supernatural subjects an attention to gesture as a vehicle for character: a posture, a hand position, the angle of a head conveys the full weight of a depicted personality. The woodblock format suits Kyosai's draftsmanship particularly well; the resistance of the block imposes a discipline that sharpens rather than restrains his line. Color is applied in flat fields with selective bokashi gradation, consistent with Meiji-period printing conventions.