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

Buddhist iconography forms a recurring thread through the Kyōsai hyakuzu series, and this print likely draws on that vein of Kyosai's practice. Trained in his early years partly under the Kanō master Tōhaku and later immersed in the Shijō tradition, Kyosai had intimate knowledge of Buddhist pictorial conventions — the mudra gestures, the iconographic attributes of individual deities, the hierarchical scaling of figures in devotional compositions. When Kyosai engaged these subjects in a woodblock context, he could both honor the conventions and inflect them with his characteristic irreverence. The nishiki-e printing process allowed for the layering of opaque pigments that suggests the gilded surfaces of temple painting, adapted to the domestic scale of an oban sheet. The result occupies a productive tension between sacred imagery and the secular, commercial world of Meiji print culture.