Untitled

This woodblock print by Kiyochika carries no title and is assigned to the abstract subject category, indicating either a non-representational design or a composition whose legibility depends on lost contextual information. His engagement with Western-influenced pictorial conventions, absorbed through contact with foreign artists and print culture during the Meiji period's rapid internationalization, gave him compositional tools unavailable to printmakers trained exclusively within the Japanese tradition. Atmospheric perspective, the systematic darkening of near-ground elements against a lighter distance, could in principle operate in a composition without a clearly identifiable subject—the recession of tonal values becoming the composition's content in the absence of a landscape or cityscape to locate them. The [oban](/glossary/oban) format typically used for his prints accommodated both horizontal and vertical compositions with equal formal efficiency.