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

This print from Kyosai hyakuzu likely represents a Buddhist or Daoist figure, a category that appears throughout the series alongside its supernatural and animal subjects. Kyosai's long study of Buddhist iconography, beginning in his boyhood apprenticeship and deepened by Kano school training, gave him fluency with the visual conventions of arhats, bodhisattvas, and ascetic monks. A figure such as Daruma in meditation, or a rakkan (arhat) with exaggerated features, would be rendered with firm, calligraphic linework in the key block and restrained, localized color. Kyosai's approach to religious subjects was never reverential in a conventional sense; his figures carry a charged vitality at odds with the stillness such themes conventionally demanded. Within the larger series, sheets depicting Buddhist subjects alternate with comic, demonic, and naturalistic images, mapping the breadth of Kyosai's pictorial and intellectual interests.