Untitled

Kiyochika produced a significant number of prints in which the nominal subject — a Tokyo street, a river, a bridge — recedes behind the treatment of light itself, making the light source the true compositional subject. This untitled work, classed as abstract, likely belongs to that tendency. During the late 1870s and 1880s, he depicted Tokyo during a period of rapid infrastructure change, including the introduction of gas streetlamps, and the unfamiliar quality of that new light gave his prints an otherworldly character. The [washi](/glossary/washi) absorbs and scatters inked color in ways that oil on canvas cannot replicate, and Kiyochika exploited this material property to achieve luminous passages within otherwise dark compositions.