Story Of the priest Nittô

This print depicts the Buddhist priest Nittō, drawn from a hagiographic episode of his religious life. The image belongs to Yoshitoshi's didactic late-Meiji production, in which moral exemplars — Buddhist masters, loyal retainers, virtuous figures from Japanese and world history — provided edifying subject matter for an audience navigating rapid Westernization. Compositionally, prints of this type isolate the central figure against a sparingly described setting, focusing attention on gesture, expression, and religious attribute. Yoshitoshi's late religious figures show his interest in psychological introspection: the inwardness of meditation rendered through controlled posture and downcast gaze. The mokuhanga technique allowed delicate gradations of sumi ink to model robe folds, while restrained colour blocks — often pale browns and indigos — preserve the contemplative tone. Compared with the supernatural drama of his ghost series, these religious subjects reveal a quieter Yoshitoshi attentive to moral seriousness. The print stands within his broader effort, in the final decade of his career, to anchor the ukiyo-e narrative tradition to subjects that would carry weight as the woodblock market declined under competition from photography and lithography.