Frontispiece Print (Kuchi-e) for a Literary Magazine

This polychrome woodblock print ([kuchi-e](/glossary/kuchi-e), 口絵) by Kobori Tomone, dated about 1906 and now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (accession JP3202; gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1959), is a characteristic example of the frontispiece prints Tomone designed for the literary magazine Bungei Kurabu and other Meiji-period periodicals between roughly 1898 and 1912. The kuchi-e was a small folded woodblock print — typically about 29.5 × 21.6 centimetres in its folded format, matching the dimensions of this sheet — bound as the opening illustration of a serialised novel or short story; the most prolific kuchi-e designers were a small group of Meiji nihonga painters (Tomone, Mizuno Toshikata, Kajita Hanko, Tomioka Eisen, Terazaki Kōgyō) who used the format as a regular source of income and as a vehicle for circulating their historical and bijin compositions to a popular literary readership. Tomone's kuchi-e were typically historical or pseudo-historical compositions — bijin in Heian or Kamakura court dress, scenes from the Heike or other medieval chronicles, episodes from the kabuki and noh repertoire — executed with the same fidelity to court costume and historical detail that characterises his hanging-scroll paintings. The present sheet entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection as part of Lincoln Kirstein's 1959 gift of Japanese prints, one of the most important single donations of kuchi-e and other Meiji woodblock material to an American institution, and is available in the public domain under the Met's CC0 dedication.