Brokaten uit de hoofdstad (Brocades of the Capital) — leporello album

Brokaten uit de hoofdstad ("Brocades of the Capital") is a leporello-format woodblock-printed album published in Kyoto in 1891, gathering twenty-six color woodblock prints by twenty leading Kyoto painters of the late Meiji period — including Takeuchi Seihō, Tomioka Tessai, Kōno Bairei, Imao Keinen, Tanaka Jihei, and Mori Kansai. The album was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (accession RP-P-2005-531) and demonstrates the Kyoto woodblock-print trade's strong international connections by the early 1890s, when major sets of this kind entered Dutch, French, German, and American collections. Kansai's contribution sits among those of his Kyoto peers and reflects his standing in the painting school community at the founding teaching staff of the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School, which he had joined in 1880. The album as a whole is a key document of late-Meiji Kyoto color printmaking and of the collaborative ehon culture in which painters like Kansai participated alongside their painting work.