Ryakugashiki

Ryakugashiki, a woodblock-printed book of 1795 held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is the founding volume in Kitao Masayoshi's celebrated sketch-album series and one of the most historically important publications of late Edo Japan. The title - ryakuga meaning "abbreviated picture," shiki indicating a method or treatise - announces a new pictorial program: a comprehensive treatment of human and natural subjects rendered in deliberately reduced, calligraphic brush line. With this 1795 publication, Masayoshi inaugurated the format that would shape Japanese visual culture for the next century and lay the conceptual groundwork for what later would be called manga. The book's reductive style was at once accessible to amateur students seeking to learn pictorial composition and sophisticated enough to delight connoisseurs, who could read in the abbreviated brush the gestures of a true master draftsman. Critically, this 1795 Ryakugashiki predates Hokusai's first Manga volume by nearly two decades, and the formal and conceptual debts later sketchbook publishers owe to Masayoshi are substantial. The Art Institute of Chicago's holding of the founding volume is an essential reference document for any study of Edo pictorial method, the prehistory of manga, and Masayoshi's central place in the Kitao school.