Keisai soga (Sketches of Keisai), one vol. of 5

Keisai soga (Sketches of Keisai), of which the Art Institute of Chicago holds one volume of a five-volume set, is a woodblock-printed book that gathers Kitao Masayoshi's drawings under his mature art name Keisai. Dated by the Art Institute to the nineteenth century, the work is one of several album-format publications that disseminated his distinctive sketch style to a broad readership. The compilation presents figures, animals, landscape vignettes, and miscellaneous subjects in the abbreviated brushed line for which Keisai is celebrated, organizing the pictures so that the reader can move freely from one subject to another. This miscellany approach, in which a sketchbook presents a wide range of unrelated subjects in rapid succession, is the very format that Katsushika Hokusai would later adopt in his celebrated Manga series. Keisai soga thus stands as an important document in the prehistory of Japanese manga. The volume at the Art Institute is part of a much larger holding of Keisai's printed books at the museum, and together these volumes provide American scholars with one of the most complete museum-side records of his book output outside Japan. The work testifies to the durability of his sketch-album format across multiple publications and decades.