Gyokusen shūgajō (Gyokusen's Collected Picture Album)

The Gyokusen shūgajō (玉泉習画帖, Gyokusen's Collected Picture Album) is a woodblock-printed picture album published in Kyoto in 1891 (Meiji 24) by Tanaka Jihē, one of the principal Kyoto publishers of Meiji-period painting manuals. The album presents a selection of Mochizuki Gyokusen's compositions across the standard kachō-ga and landscape categories, arranged as a study album for the use of younger painters and amateur students of the brush — a kind of book that had a long history in Kyoto, from the Edo-period painting manuals of Tachibana Morikuni and Ōoka Shunboku through to the great Meiji albums of Kōno Bairei, Imao Keinen, and others. Tanaka Jihē was the same publisher who issued Bairei's painting albums in the 1880s and 1890s, and the Gyokusen shūgajō sits squarely within that circle of Kyoto publications. The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art Study Collection holds a complete four-volume set (FSC-GR-780.421.1-4), one of several institutional copies preserved in Western and Japanese collections; a digitised copy is available through the Internet Archive and through the Smithsonian Libraries' open-access programme. The album is the single most reproducible primary source for Gyokusen's compositional repertoire and remains the most accessible point of entry into his career for collectors and students of Meiji Kyoto painting.