Untitled

Gekko worked extensively in the [oban](/glossary/oban) vertical format for figural subjects and the oban horizontal format for landscape and narrative compositions. This untitled print may represent one of his compositional types combining figure and landscape — a woman on a bridge over water, figures in a garden at a particular season, or travelers on a road with a recognizable landmark in the distance. Such compositions were common in Meiji-era printmaking and allowed Gekko to demonstrate facility with both the [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) figure tradition and the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) landscape tradition. His figural work from the 1890s and 1900s shows increasing integration of Western spatial recession, with figures placed within environments rendered with atmospheric depth rather than the flat-ground conventions inherited from earlier [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) bijin-ga.