Young Nobleman Crouching beside His Horse

Young Nobleman Crouching beside His Horse is a woodblock print in the [surimono](/glossary/surimono) format, executed in ink and color on paper and dating to roughly the turn of the nineteenth century. The work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stands as evidence of Kiitsu's participation in the small but culturally significant world of surimono production, the privately commissioned prints that wealthy poetry circles distributed to their members and friends rather than offering for public sale.

The composition shows a young nobleman in a moment of pause, crouching beside the horse he has presumably just dismounted, in a quiet incident drawn from the conventions of classical Japanese narrative imagery. The horse subject connects the work to the broader tradition of equestrian painting that ran through Japanese pictorial culture from the medieval emaki scrolls onward, while the format of the print and its restrained palette of metallic and chromatic pigments mark it as a refined private object rather than a commercial publication.

Kiitsu's involvement in surimono production places him within the broader network of late-Edo cultural production, in which painters of the established schools, kyoka poets, woodblock carvers, and printers collaborated on the production of objects that functioned as both poetry albums and miniature painting collections. The work demonstrates that his decorative discipline translated effectively into the printed medium, where the linear precision and the controlled distribution of color that characterize his painted work also serve the requirements of the carved block.