Mikado Palace (One Hundred Views of Tokyo, Message to the 21st Century 東京百景 21世紀へのメッセジ)

This print held at the Art Institute of Chicago and titled Mikado Palace, from the series One Hundred Views of Tokyo, Message to the 21st Century, is a contemporary copper-plate print from 1991 attributed in the institution's records to a Kitao Masayoshi associated with the late twentieth-century portfolio project. It is not a work by the Edo-period sketch-album master Kitao Masayoshi (1764-1824), and Hanga preserves the record only as part of a complete museum catalog. The actual eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Kitao Masayoshi died nearly two centuries before this print was produced, and his oeuvre consists of color woodblock prints, illustrated books, and the famous ryakugashiki sketch albums rather than copper-plate engravings. For collectors specifically interested in the Edo-period printmaker and his Kitao-school output, the other works in this catalog - the perspective Chushingura series, the kacho-e, the landscape prints, and the ryakugashiki sketch albums - are the relevant body of material. The Art Institute's broader holdings include a substantial collection of authentic Kitao Masayoshi prints and books that provide essential reference for studying his place in the history of Japanese woodblock prints and the prehistory of manga.