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

Part of the Kyôsai hyakuzu, this woodblock print likely depicts a fox transformation scene or kitsune subject, a recurring motif in Kyosai's broader output. The fox in Japanese visual culture carries associations with Inari worship, trickery, and erotic deception, and Kyosai exploited all of these registers across his career. A transformation image might show the fox mid-metamorphosis, its animal form partially yielding to human shape, a subject that allowed Kyosai to demonstrate his facility with anatomical distortion and psychological ambiguity. The printed line would carry the fluency of a brush practiced in rapid, assured strokes, with a particularly demanding block-carving challenge in the transitional zones between animal and human forms. Color blocking in such subjects often emphasizes the fox's characteristic ochre fur against paler or cooler grounds, with selective bokashi lending atmospheric recession to any landscape elements. Within the series, such prints sit between the devotional and the comic without resolving cleanly into either.