Page 11 from the book Ōkyo Shūbi gafu

This sheet from the Ōkyo Shūbi gafu (Picture Book Showing Ōkyo's Own Brush) is held by the Art Institute of Chicago (1968.336) and is part of the Bruce Goff Archive, given by Shin'enkan, Inc. The Ōkyo Shūbi gafu is a Meiji-era woodblock-printed picture book first issued in Kyoto in 1892, nearly a century after Ōkyo's death, by publishers seeking to reproduce his brush sketches in accessible printed form. Each page reproduces a single Ōkyo composition — animals, plants, figures, or landscape vignettes — in color woodblock, with the carvers and printers attempting to preserve the brush movement and ink-wash modulation of the original sketch. The plates served two audiences: aspiring painters in the Maruyama-Shijō lineage who used the album as a model book, and general collectors who valued Ōkyo's name and naturalistic style. The Art Institute's example belongs to the gift collection assembled by the architect Bruce Goff, who built one of the most significant American holdings of Japanese prints and books in the mid-twentieth century. The 1892 picture book was one of several Meiji reproduction publications — alongside the earlier Ōkyo gafu (1850) and the Yen ōgafu (1837 edition) — that circulated Ōkyo's brush designs in printed form throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, well after his death in 1795.