Nihon Mōhitsu Gachō (Japanese Paintbrush Picture Album), Volume 1

Nihon Mōhitsu Gachō (Japanese Paintbrush Picture Album), Volume 1 is a single-artist printed picture album by Kikuchi Hōbun published in 1900 (Meiji 33), now in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery in Nashville (accession 1978.103a). Single-artist gafu albums of this kind were the principal channel by which the work of senior Kyoto Shijō-school painters reached the Meiji-period book-buying public — Kōno Bairei's Bairei Hyakuchō Gafu (Bairei's Picture Album of One Hundred Birds, 1881) had set the model, and his senior pupils, Imao Keinen, Kikuchi Hōbun, and Takeuchi Seihō, each in turn produced their own single-artist albums in the 1890s and 1900s. The Nihon Mōhitsu Gachō belongs to this lineage of late-Meiji kachō-e albums: it deploys Hōbun's bird-and-flower subjects across woodblock-printed plates, with the artist's brush drawing translated into the multi-block color woodblock idiom that the Kyoto publishers had refined in the second half of the nineteenth century. The album's subjects follow the canonical kachō-e seasonal vocabulary — small birds among flowering branches, sparrows in autumn grasses, the autumn insects and waterside birds of the late-summer and autumn seasons — rendered in the close observation and restrained color that distinguished Hōbun's mature Shijō manner from the brighter decoration of the contemporary Tokyo kachō-e specialists. The Vanderbilt copy entered the university's Fine Arts Gallery in 1978 and is one of the few institutional copies of the album in a North American collection.