Figure on Plain Ground

This nineteenth-century single-sheet nishiki-e in chūban format, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum (accession number E.13870-1886), depicts a figure against a plain ground. The sheet measures 26 by 18.4 centimeters, the smaller chūban dimensions that were widely used for Osaka kamigata-e and for economical Edo prints aimed at less affluent buyers. The print was purchased by the museum in 1886 from S. M. Franck & Co., a London dealer who supplied a substantial body of Japanese prints to the V&A in the 1880s. The smaller chūban size and the spare "figure on plain ground" composition suggest a quiet, unembellished sheet of the sort that nineteenth-century print publishers issued by the dozens for the urban print market. Like the other Yoshimune sheets in the same Franck acquisition, this print documents the wider production of the Utagawa school in the Bakumatsu and early Meiji decades, when designers worked simultaneously across multiple formats and subjects to meet a varied print trade. The sheet is preserved in the V&A's collection of Japanese woodblock prints.