Horse, from the series "Twelve Signs of the Zodiac"

Horse from the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac is the uma (horse) plate of Seihō's zodiac album, here in a 1906 impression catalogued by the Japanese Art Open Database and published by Unsōdō in Kyoto. The composition isolates a galloping horse against unprinted ground, its body rendered in confident [sumi](/glossary/sumi) line with patches of warm color where the mane and chest catch implied light. The horse was one of Seihō's lifelong subjects: he had studied them under Bairei, refined the motif during his European travels (where his sketches of European cavalry horses survive in Kyoto archives), and produced versions of the galloping or grazing horse in painting, sketch, and print throughout his career. The album plate retains the immediacy of those original brush studies, the woodblock carvers preserving the slight hesitations and accelerations of Seihō's line. The sheet is double-ōban in format and bears the artist's red signature and seal. The horse year (uma-doshi) is the seventh animal in the East Asian zodiac and was traditionally associated with energy, freedom, and travel — appropriate themes for the new-year gift prints that the album generated. The 1906 dating recorded for this impression places it among the earliest album printings, before the more familiar 1910s and 1920s reissues by Unsōdō, and corresponds with the period when Seihō was establishing his post-European synthesis of Shijō brush and Western observation.