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

This print is one of the one hundred designs comprising the Kyosai hyakuzu, published in the Meiji period as an anthology of Kyosai's pictorial imagination. The series was a vehicle for demonstrating range: Kyosai moved between registers — devotional, grotesque, lyrical, satirical — with a facility that few artists of his era could match. This sheet may feature a bird or animal subject, a kacho-e composition in which Kyosai brought his Kano training and naturalist observation to bear on the formal demands of the genre. His kacho-e work tends toward dynamic positioning rather than the static, decorative arrangement associated with Rinpa: a hawk mid-stoop, a heron caught in the act of stepping through shallows. The oban-format composition uses the full sheet with an economy that makes negative space as active as the depicted subject. Multiple woodblocks establish color fields while preserving the energy of the underlying brushwork.